Annenberg Institute for School Reform • Voices in Urban Education

SUMMER 2012

Free Minds, Free People: Education for a Just, Multiracial Future Keith Catone

Countering the Master Narratives: The “Why?” of Education for Liberation Charles M. Payne

Empowering Young People to Be Critical Thinkers: Education is Under Attack! What Do We Do? Stand The Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson Up! Fight Back! Teacher Activism in the Occupy Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir Wall Street Movement Bree Picower A Dialogue between Generations on Education for Liberation A World Where Youth Hold the Power Vincent Harding and Antonio Albizures with Adeola A. Oredola with members of Youth in Action AdeolaI A. OredolaAnnenberg Institute for School Reform This issue of Voices in Urban Education was developed in collaboration with the Education for Liberation Network (EdLib, www.edliberation. org), a national coalition of teachers, community activists, youth, researchers, and parents who Education for Liberation believe a good education should teach people – Number 34, Summer 2012 particularly low-income youth and youth of color Executive Editor – to understand and challenge the injustices their Philip Gloudemans communities face. Guest Editor EdLib hosts Free Minds, Free People (FMFP), a Keith Catone national gathering that brings these groups together every two years to build a movement to develop Managing Editor and promote education as a tool for liberation. Margaret Balch-Gonzalez The network seeks to develop ways of teaching Assistant Editor and learning both in and out of school that help O’rya Hyde-Keller us to build a more just society. The conference is a space in which these groups can learn from and Production and Distribution teach each other, sharing knowledge, experience, Mary Arkins Decasse and strategies. It takes place every other year. Design The last FMFP, of which the Annenberg Institute Brown University Graphic Services for School Reform was a co-sponsor, took place in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2011. The next Illustrator conference will take place in Salt Lake City, June Robert Brinkerhoff 27–30, 2013. Please visit www.fmfp.org for more Voices in Urban Education (ISSN 1553- information. 541x) is published quarterly at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Ar- EdLib also co-publishes, in partnership with the ticles may be reproduced with appropriate New York Collective of Radical Educators, a credit to the Annenberg Institute. Single unique social justice lesson plan book for teach- copies are $12.50 each, including postage ers called Planning to Change the World. Please and handling. A discount is available visit www.justiceplanbook.com to learn more and on bulk orders. Call 401 863-2018 for further information. order the 2012-2013 edition. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform was established in 1993 at Brown University. Its mission is to develop, share, and act on knowledge that improves the conditions and outcomes of schooling in America, especially in urban communities and in schools attended by traditionally underserved children. For program information, contact: Annenberg Institute for School Reform Brown University, Box 1985 Providence, Rhode Island 02912 Tel: 401 863-7990 Fax: 401 863-1290 Web: www.annenberginstitute.org Twitter: @AnnenbergInst © 2012 Annenberg Institute for School Reform

II Annenberg Institute for School Reform Education for Liberation

Free Minds, Free People: Education for a Just, Multiracial Future 3 Keith Catone

Countering the Master Narratives: The “Why?” of Education for Liberation 6 Charles M. Payne Education for liberation helps young people identify the biases of mainstream narratives, examine the social forces that impact their lives, and take collective action for more just alternatives.

Empowering Young People to Be Critical Thinkers: The Mexican American 15 Studies Program in Tucson Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir A teacher and a student in Tucson’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program, recently shut down by state and district officials, describe how the program has transformed the lives of its students and teachers.

A Dialogue between Generations on Education for Liberation 27 Vincent Harding and Antonio Albizures with Adeola A. Oredola A seasoned civil rights activist and scholar and a young immigrant rights organizer dialogue about how their generations can work together to create a more democratic, multicultural, and just future.

Education is Under Attack! What Do We Do? Stand Up! Fight Back! 37 Teacher Activism in the Occupy Wall Street Movement Bree Picower Teacher activists engaged in the Occupy the DOE movement in New York City are working to end the oppression standing in the way of a more just society, both inside and outside the classroom.

A World Where Youth Hold the Power 47 Adeola A. Oredola with members of Youth in Action The space cultivated by the youth leadership development organization Youth In Action puts young people, traditionally marginalized by adult decision-makers, at the center of change in the community.

1 Annenberg Institute for School Reform This issue of Voices in Urban Education is dedicated to Matthew Bradley, an assistant professor for the Honors College at the University of Utah and a teacher of honors classes at AMES High School. A longtime teacher activist, he was instrumental in bringing the 2013 Free Minds, Free People conference to Salt Lake City.

Matthew Wade Bradley August 19, 1970 – March 20, 2012

Déjenme decirles, a riesgo de parecer ridículo, que el revolucionario verdadero está guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.

– Che Guevara, letter to Carlos Quijano

This was one of Matt Bradley’s favorite quotes, words he lived by as an activist, teacher, scholar, friend, and community member. Matt believed in the transformative power of education for liberation and worked to create access to education for all people, and in particular he struggled with others to fight for undocumented students’ rights to education. Matt was a powerful life force in our community and universe, whose sense of purpose, commitment, and vision continues to inspire us all to be our best selves.

Carrying him in our hearts and minds, we commit to live our lives with full and wild abandon: to laugh, play, and imagine new ways to live together; to read poetry; to ride bikes; to grow gardens; to eat fresh tomatoes and chilis (any and everything spicy!); to be respectful of others; to create alterna- tive creative spaces for dialogue, teaching and learning, organizing, critical thinking, collective action, art, and social justice.

– Mestizo Arts and Activism Collective Free Minds, Free People Salt Lake City Team June 2012

2 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Free Minds, Free People: Education for a Just, Multiracial Future

Keith Catone

s the field of education follows myriad paths of reform, not enough of us are stopping to consider the essential question: For Awhat? We must close achievement gaps . . . for what? We must measure and evaluate teacher effectiveness . . . for what? We must develop and adhere to high quality standards . . . for what? We must race to the top . . . for what? In other words, to what end are we engaged in educational experiences? Implicit – at times explicit – aims of the most popular mainstream education reform trends center around global competition and economic prowess.1 Little seems focused on the core functions of education as the necessary threads weaving the democratic fabric of society. Even less focus is on the liberatory potential of education, on its importance in forming the most basic foundation of our individual and collective humanness.

The Free Minds, Free People (FMFP) conference and the Education for Liberation Network seek to understand, frame, and practice education for the purpose of freedom – a true collective realization of liberty and justice for all. In 2009, a group of young people and their adult allies from Youth In Action traveled from Providence to Houston to attend the second- ever FMFP. They experienced a space cultivated by the conference that was authentically intergenerational, supporting the voices and ideas of young and old alike to coexist in dialogue. They experienced a conference dedicated to lifting up those most historically marginalized from power and understood that such a space has the potential to empower people to imagine and then work to make real the change they want to see in the world. They returned to Providence energized and poised to work to bring FMFP to their city. I was lucky enough to be part of the Youth In Action family and served as one of the local conference organizers. The power of working with educators and young people from across the country to make FMFP a reality in Providence in July 2011 was awe-inspiring.

The most amazing part of the FMFP experience is the way in which the conference builds the space for all participants to be seen and heard. Participants do not gain special attention for their titles and degrees, but

1 See, for example, the recently released “U.S. Education Reform and National Security” report from the Council on Foreign Relations (www.cfr.org/united-states/ us-education-reform-national-security/p27618).

Keith Catone is a senior research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

3 Annenberg Institute for School Reform rather for the value of their contributions to the field of education for liberation. When university professors speak as equals alongside youth activists, and young people are treated as experts about their own realities, both groups are humanized. The conference aspires to have participants bring their whole selves to the fore and to contribute their full humanness for others to see and understand.

More broadly, our society is without an education for liberation, without free minds and free people. Instead, we live in a society with a stark inability to recognize the humanity of all its members. Two recent events illustrate our current society’s severe limitations with respect to human liberation. First, take Arizona’s attack on the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, declaring it illegal, and the district’s subsequent decision to cease the program. In this issue of VUE (page 12), Charles Payne writes: “Declaring Mexican American Studies illegal is the moral equivalent of white supremacists in the South burning Black schoolhouses after the Civil War.” In other words, to ignore the life experiences, histories, and perspectives of communities of color in the United States is to ignore their human rights to freedom and equality. In essence, this active ignorance paints people of color one-dimensionally by forcing their histories and narratives into the dominant white mainstream, thus rendering invisible the human complexity of people and communities of color.

Related is the tragic murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, the man who pulled the trigger that ended Tra- vyon’s life, didn’t see a young man standing in front of him. Instead, what he saw was a brown-skinned male in a hoodie, and quickly assumed Trayvon was “up to no good” or “on drugs or something” in a call to a 911 dispatcher. A view that, in Zimmerman’s mind, was grounds for murder. Subsequent reports leaking information about past school suspensions attempted to call Trayvon’s character into question and represent extended efforts to deny his humanity, serving to try to justify his murder.

Education for liberation combats the refusal to see humanness in others, and in doing so allows us all to be fully human. Education for liberation makes necessary and central the full humanity of all people to exist and act upon their world. It assumes, as Charles Payne express- es (see page 13), that people need to be educated in a way that helps them understand and “think more critically about the social forces that shape our lives and think more confidently about their ability to react against those forces.”

Ultimately, the social forces that prompted Zimmerman to see a young man with a bag of candy as a threat and that feed the fear and distrust Arizona politicians have of Mexican American youth who have found their voice through a curriculum that honors who they are and where they come from, must be challenged. Payne paraphrases Charlie Cobb, one of the lead architects of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom School for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project (see page 13), as reflecting that students need “to challenge the myths

4 Annenberg Institute for School Reform of our society, to perceive more clearly its realities, to find alternatives and ultimately new directions for action.” And as fellow civil rights movement leader Vincent Harding often points out, we are “citizens of a country that does not yet exist.”2 Thus, it is our responsibility to work to create that country yet to be.

This issue of VUE seeks to raise up various voices and perspectives on what it means to engage in education for liberation, and what it means to free minds and free people. You’ll hear from movement historians, teachers and students, youth activists and organizers, and community- based educators and academics:

• Charles Payne, an academic historian, discusses how education for liberation helps young people identify the biases of mainstream narratives, examine the social forces that impact their lives, and take collective action for more just alternatives.

• Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir describe their experiences as teacher and student in Tucson’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program, recently shut down by state and district officials, and how the program has transformed the lives of its students and teachers.

• Vincent Harding, a seasoned civil rights activist and scholar, and Antonio Albizures, a young immigrant rights organizer, dialogue about how their generations can work together to create a more democratic, multicultural, and just future.

• Bree Picower, teacher educator and activist, shares the thoughts and ideas of teachers engaged in the Occupy the DOE movement in New York City who work to end the oppression standing in the way of a more just society, both inside and outside the classroom.

• Adeola Oredola and other youth and community leaders from Youth In Action reflect on how the space cultivated by their organization puts young people, traditionally marginalized by adult decision-makers, at the center of change in the community.

As you read through the dialogue created by the voices on these pages, I hope you’ll be challenged to consider where your own voice fits in. Taken together, these short articles aim to help all of us better imagine the world we seek to create for ourselves and the important role that education – in its various forms, through its multiple venues, and with its many participants – plays in our collective construction of this world. And, if you are so inspired, I hope to see you in Salt Lake City, Utah, from June 27 to 30, 2013, at the next Free Minds, Free People.

For more information on the conference, see www.fmfp.org.

2 I have heard Vincent Harding speak two different times – at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit and during the keynote conversation with Antonio Albizures at FMFP in Providence (see excerpts from this conversation on pages 27–33) – and during each one he has invoked this phrase, quoting an unnamed African poet he once heard.

5 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Countering the Master Narratives: The “Why?” of Education for Liberation

Charles M. Payne

Education for liberation helps young people iden- few years ago, some of us in tify the biases of mainstream narratives, examine Chicago started a program the social forces that impact their lives, and take Athat was very much in dialogue collective action for more just alternatives. with Theresa Perry’s work. Funda- mental to her argument in Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Note: This article is excerpted from material Achievement among African-American that will appear in a forthcoming book to Students is the proposition that the be published by Beacon Press. task of intellectual achievement for Black children is different because of Too many young people have been the constant recycling of notions of separated from both their past and Black moral, cultural, and intellectual their future leaving a vast and aching inferiority (Perry, Steele & Hilliard void, often to be filled with noth- 2003). Intellectual development for ing more than the most destructive Black children, then, is ordinarily values of society. development under hostile conditions. – Vincent Harding, Hope and History What does it mean to teach to this context, to teach counter-hegemonically? Not everything that is faced can be Over our first year or so, two incidents changed, but nothing can be changed seemed to best epitomize the prob- until it is faced. lem. One February, as a Black History – James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as Month activity, we sponsored a play One Can Bear”

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, where he is also an affiliate of the Urban Education Institute.

6 Annenberg Institute for School Reform on Harriet Tubman for about 1,200 not in his hometown. Because we were high school students from Chicago’s in Chicago, we could actually do it at South Side high schools, schools with the school that Emmett Till attended, essentially all–Black student bodies.1 which just a few years prior had been There was considerable anxiety about renamed in his honor. We talked to the whether it was safe to have that many teachers there about their attempts to students from different schools sitting teach that history in that neighborhood. in the dark, but that part went off with- They told us that when they first tried, out a hitch. What was interesting was they met resistance from both students how the students reacted to the content and parents. Their students didn’t see of the play. why the history was important, didn’t see why it should matter to them, and The play opens with a flashback involv- frequently thought Till’s murder was ing an actress changing from smart, his own fault for doing something he modern garb to the tattered, dirty cloth- should have known not to do; Till’s ing of a slave. At the sight of the slave, uncle should have stood up to those the audience started giggling and laugh- white men. If they had been there, they ing. (And, if they were anything like the wouldn’t have let white people treat boys I grew up with, they were poking them like that. Not surprisingly, there one another and whispering, “That’s were residents who opposed renaming your Momma . . . ”) The actress, who the school at all. “What did he do that expected that reaction, stopped the was so special?” – another version of play, stepped out of character and did “Niggers ain’t shit.” the Sistuh thing – hands on her hips – “What’s so funny?” She challenged the Even before these experiences, Chicago audience to give her an honest explana- schools used to frequently invite me tion. That huge auditorium just shut to do Black History Month presenta- down. No one gave a clear answer, tions, and an easy way to do that was and students seemed embarrassed that to show some footage about the civil she had called them out. The actress’s rights movement from the PBS televi- interpretation was that Black youth sion series Eyes on the Prize and use have been taught to be ashamed of that as the basis of a conversation. the African American past, slavery in When middle school and junior high particular, and laughter is a way to students watched demonstrations with distance themselves from the shameful. dogs being sicced on people and people What we should hear in that laughter is being firehosed and clubbed by police, “Niggers ain’t shit – but I’m OK.” a very common reaction, perhaps the dominant one, was to decide the dem- The other defining incident came during onstrators were at fault for taking it. It a professional development day that was easier for some students to identify we held for teachers on the history of with the police doing the whipping than Emmett Till.2 We shouldn’t let Till’s with the demonstrators being whipped. story be lost anywhere, but certainly The demonstrators had to be punks: “If I were back there then . . .” Young 1 For more about this production, see people in whose names the movement www.karenjonesmeadows.com/about_the_ was waged could not identify with it. production.php. 2 Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 by white supremacists while visiting relatives in Mississippi, after he was accused of flirting with a white woman.

7 Annenberg Institute for School Reform HOW DOMINANT NARRATIVES At the same time, as much as anyone SHAPE US else, youth from stigmatized groups can see the “evidence” of collective In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin underachievement all about them – the (1993) gives his characterization of the poverty, the troubled neighborhoods, Black past: the absent fathers, the academic fail- This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, ure, their own constant exposure to fire, torture, castration, infanticide, violence, real and symbolic. Nothing rape; death and humiliation; fear by about being in a subordinate group day and night, fear as deep as the automatically gives them deep insight marrow of the bones; doubt that he into the contemporary forces repro- was worthy of life, since everyone ducing inequality. Like many majority around him denied it; sorrow for group members, they may not have his women, for his kinfolk, for his sufficient historical or sociological children, who needed his protection, understanding to explain those failures and whom he could not protect; in any way other than some kind of rage, hatred, and murder, hatred collective deficiency – or to just not for white men so deep that it often think about them. turned against him and his own, Both the past as imagined and the and made all love, all trust, all joy present as experienced suggest, indi- impossible. (p. 98) rectly, as if whispered, that there may That is bad history and poor sociology. be something wrong with Blacks and It’s bad history because, to paraphrase Latinos. On top of that, often irrespec- the historian Herbert Gutman, it focus- tive of their class background, children es on what was done to Black people, of color have to negotiate their way not on what they did with what was through institutional contexts that done to them. Had Baldwin looked at are anything but welcoming – the the latter, he would have found a his- stores and malls where it looks like tory of resistance in forms both small you’re being followed, the hassling and dramatic. And it’s poor sociology, from police, the harsh and punitive because it assumes that white people nature of many schools. Data from took so much from Black people that the U.S. Department of Education, for Black people had nothing left to give example, shows that Black students one another. are three and a half times more likely to be suspended than white students But this quote reflects a vision of the (Adams, Robelen & Shah 2012). Previ- past too common in Baldwin’s Harlem ous studies have shown that Black or today’s Chicago. Even the most and Hispanic students receive harsher insightful among us have been shaped punishments for the same offenses by the dominant narratives. History (Gregory, Skiba & Noguera 2010) confronts children of color as an accu- and that this differential treatment is sation – they were slaves or peasants or noticed by students and teachers and the militarily defeated or the colonized; attributed to racism, although Sambo or Dumb Pancho; they were the least intelligent, the wetbacks and white students and teachers per- the illegals, the poorest, the worst ceived racial disparity in discipline educated, or perhaps, most damningly, as unintentional or unconscious, they just weren’t there; they don’t come [while] students of color saw it as into the picture. (And “contribution- conscious and deliberate, arguing ist” history – “Look what minorities that teachers often apply classroom have contributed!” – is probably not rules and guidelines arbitrarily to the way to answer this.)

8 Annenberg Institute for School Reform exercise control, or to remove stu- scores. Of course, that is important, dents whom they do not like. (Skiba but children may be wrestling with et al. 2000, p. 17) issues that are much more fundamental. And when they get help with that, It shouldn’t be surprising, then, if there is reason to believe that some of Black and Latino youth start off with the narrowly academic issues wither. a sense of being behind, of having something to prove that others don’t. They respond as young people will, by TEACHING TRUTH TO POWER creating, from the cultural materials around them, their own counter-narra- I have been teaching courses on the civ- tives of worth, among them narratives il rights movement since 1979. When that center on personal style, tough- I’ve spoken with students about what ness, and aggressive masculinity and they get out of the course, the answers that create symbolic distance between haven’t changed much over the years. themselves and previous generations. Students of all backgrounds say they Without guidance and support, youth become more reflective about their will create some counter-narratives own values; they find models for how that are useful, but also some that they want to live their lives (Ella Baker undermine their own development, that and Fannie Lou Hamer probably top discourage them from taking advantage the list). Students of all backgrounds of such opportunities as they do have. say they think more confidently about challenging the barriers in their lives. This should help us appreciate what More, they wonder how they can be we know about race and trust. A agents of change; the idea that ordi- national survey from Pew Charitable nary people can be historical actors Trust, for example, found Blacks and seems less far-fetched. Hispanics substantially less trusting than whites. Only 32 percent of whites Intellectually, by far the strongest effect were in the lowest trust categories, is that when they understand that most against 53 percent of Hispanics and of what they have been taught about 61 percent of Blacks (Taylor, Funk & the civil rights movement is a fairy tale, Clark 2007, p. 1). they begin wondering what else they have been lied to about. When they Educators do not pay nearly enough learn that some of the most important attention to the implications of these shapers of the movement are people figures. They suggest a profoundly de- they have never heard of, when they fensive orientation to life; they suggest learn that the movement began well people who are not sure they fit into before Montgomery, when they learn or are accepted by the larger commu- that Rosa Parks was an experienced nity. Much of the national discourse and determined activist, not some nice is simply in denial about the difficult woman who stumbled into history, developmental terrain facing too many they begin thinking about whose view- youngsters from socially marginalized points are systematically built into or communities. The way we continue left out of other social narratives. to scratch our heads about achievement gaps is itself one form of denial; Black students, though, say some- the presumption in many such discus- thing more. They say they respect sions is that we’re giving children what their grandparents in a different way they need to succeed and they are still and they frequently refer to it in just failing for some mysterious reason. that highly personalized way – “my A corollary denial is the idea that all grandparents.” Even though they may would be well if we could just raise test use the word “respect,” I’ve become

9 Annenberg Institute for School Reform less convinced that it conveys the and usually receive only a sketchy complexity of their feelings. Maybe account historically, being featured “disregarded” is closer to how they mainly in relationship to slavery. felt previously; they hadn’t thought Asian Americans and Latinos much about what kinds of people they appear mainly as figures on the

were descended from because they landscape with virtually no history didn’t see a reason to think about it. or contemporary ethnic experience. They “knew” they were descended Native Americans appear mainly from slaves and people who were in the past, but also occasionally

always dominated by white people. in contemporary stories in reading books. Immigration is represented as a distinct historical period that happened mainly in the Northeast, “ rather than as an ongoing phenom- enon. . . . Texts say little to nothing about contemporary race relations, What is striking is the number of racism, or racial issues, usually sanitizing greatly what they men- different ways students are undermined tion. (p. 2)

by discrimination. Strong ethnic studies programs are “ founded on a very different set of principles, which Sleeter sees as:

• explicit identification of the point of view from which knowledge ema- Reconnecting them to a more complex nates and the relationship between history restores their ancestors to them social location and perspective; as being as complicated and as capable and as troubled as anyone else. • examination of U.S. colonialism historically, as well as how relations Much talk about multicultural cur- of colonialism continue to play out; riculum and diversity notwithstanding, youngsters are not likely to encounter • examination of the historical con- much critical teaching before college struction of race and institutional (except youngsters from privileged racism, how people navigate racism, backgrounds). Christine Sleeter’s and struggles for liberation; (2011) review finds that the recent • probing meanings of collective or changes in textbooks have been communal identities that people pretty weak tea. Content has been hold; and added about African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Na- • studying one’s community’s creative tive Americans, but the narratives and and intellectual products, both his- interpretations continue to reflect a toric and contemporary. Euro-American centrality: This is a far cry from the pablum Whites continue to receive the most students are ordinarily offered. While attention and appear in the widest students cannot articulate it in this variety of roles, dominating story way, they do seem to have some degree lines and lists of accomplishments. of understanding that they are being African Americans, the next most cheated. Sleeter cites work suggest- represented racial group, appear ing that from middle school on, at in a more limited range of roles least some African American students

10 Annenberg Institute for School Reform are aware of the limited portrayal of control group in school connectedness, African Americans in the curriculum, motivation to achieve, and overall the absence of any sustained analysis social change involvement. of racism, and the unrelenting focus Telles and Ortiz (2008) called atten- on victimization, all of which seem to tion to evidence showing that in recent contribute to an increasing disinterest decades, each succeeding generation of and distrust in school history as they Mexican-descended youth has per- grow older. formed less well than the preceding The main point of Sleeter’s review of generations. Sleeter (2011) cites a study the literature is to ascertain the impact of 185 Latino/a eighth-graders that of ethnic studies programs. While there suggests an explanation. Students with are concerns with the quality of the higher grades tended to have bicultural sample in many studies and with identities. Both those students who the grounds for causal inference, she showed little identification with their concludes that there is considerable ethnicity and the handful of students evidence that well-executed programs who identified only with their culture are associated with positive outcomes of origin did worse than those stu- on a wide array of important social dents who identified with both Anglo and academic indicators, including and Mexican culture. Earlier studies sense of agency, engagement, higher- of African American students showed order thinking, high school graduation, similar results. grades, motivation, and writing skills. Ominously, the researchers also found The fact that so many different indica- that each generation of Latino students tors seem to be involved and that some identified less with their ethnic culture, of them, such as agency and higher- giving up whatever buffering and af- order thinking, might be considered firmation that culture had offered the “master variables” may be a sugges- generations before them who main- tion that something fundamental tained bicultural identities. is changing in students in ethnic studies programs. Wong, Eccles, and Sameroff (2003) have done another study that helps us Random assignment studies are rare think about the protective effects of but not completely absent.3 Sleeter strong ethnic identity. Their concern cites one that focused on African and was with how Black junior high school African American history and culture, students reacted to perceived discrimi- African rituals and practices, build- nation from peers or teachers. They ing communalism, student leadership collected data from students near the and activism, and school/community beginning of their seventh-grade year partnerships for the experimental and the end of their eighth-grade year. group. Youth in that curriculum For these students, discrimination usu- outperformed students assigned to the ally took the form of people thinking they were dumb or people thinking they were a threat of some sort. 3 Random assignment is a type of research design in which a lottery-like process is What is striking in their findings is the used to allocate individuals between two number of different ways students are (or more) groups: the test group, which undermined by discrimination. Per- enrolls in a certain program or receives a ceived discrimination predicted declines certain treatment, and a control group, which does not. This maximizes the in grades, academic self-concepts, probability that any difference between the self-esteem, and psychological resil- two groups is due to the test program or iency, while also predicting increases in treatment and not to some other factor.

11 Annenberg Institute for School Reform depression and anger. It also predicted Black schoolhouses after the Civil War. increases in the proportion of reported It is also a sharp reminder that youth friends who were not interested in of color are hardly the only people school and who had problem behav- who need liberating. This is militant iors. We can only wonder how many ignorance. What the critics seem to other experiences drag students down lack is any sense of “the relationship in so many ways. between social location and perspective,” to borrow Sleeter’s language, any The other striking point is that having sense that their point of view is a point a stronger racial identity was, again, of view, not a received truth. Mark protective. When those students saw Twain (1889) put it well: discrimination, it had less effect on their self-concept, academic ability, The blunting effects of slavery upon school achievement, or engagement in the slaveholder’s moral perceptions problem behaviors. They also chose are known and conceded the world more positive friends. This point about over; and a privileged class . . . is the possible impact of discrimina- but a band of slaveholders under tion on friendship formation should another name. (pp. 224–225) give us pause. It seems possible that The people who destroyed this pro- discrimination not only directly and gram are as much trapped by ignorance immediately de-centers youth, but that and fear characteristic of their social it may also be leading them to select location as the young men who make friends in ways that can have far-reach- our city streets unlivable with their mi- ing consequences. sogyny and violence. Part of what they This research should help us more fully fail to appreciate is that for youngsters appreciate the destructive nature of on the margins, learning to critique the January 2011 decision by the city society is a way to become engaged of Tucson making its widely praised with it. The ones to be feared are not Mexican American Studies program the ones with critique but the ones who illegal.4 Here, too, participation in the have given up on the larger society, the program was associated with positive ones without a framework for under- results – stronger reading and writ- standing the constraints on their lives. ing scores and a greater likelihood of graduating high school. In spite of that, critics of the program claimed THINKING CRITICALLY, that these classes were “promoting TAKING ACTION resentment toward a class of people” Families and communities develop and “promoting the overthrow of the ways to support the development of U.S. government.” children in hostile circumstances, but Declaring Mexican American Studies the effectiveness of those strategies illegal is the moral equivalent of white may vary with time and circumstance. supremacists in the South burning After World War II, it may have been increasingly difficult for minority communities to protect their children from 4 See Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir’s article in a sneering or indifferent larger world. this issue of VUE for more on the Tucson’s The growth of mass media – and by Mexican American Studies program. For a history of the protest movement some measures, minority youngsters unleashed by Tucson’s action, see the are especially exposed to mass me- “No History is Illegal” website at www. dia – meant that social imagery was teacheractivistgroups.org/Tucson.

12 Annenberg Institute for School Reform increasingly being shaped by forces Charlie Cobb, who shaped the idea of outside the community. At the same the Freedom School for the Student time, the massive national decline in Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in social capital that Robert Putnam the context of the Mississippi Summer (2000) has documented for the nation Project of 1964, said that what he was as a whole may have meant that some trying to do was to minority communities had less of the make it possible for Mississippi cohesion that had previously helped students to challenge the myths of them buffer their children from the our society, to perceive more clearly “outside gaze.” its realities, to find alternatives and If so, education for liberation becomes ultimately new directions for action. increasingly important. I use that That is still hard to improve upon. term to mean those forms of educa- When they discover who they are, as tion that are intended to help people Ralph Ellison put it, they’ll be free. think more critically about the social forces that shape our lives and think more confidently about their ability to react against those forces. It can take a variety of forms (Payne & Strickland 2008) – consciousness-raising groups, Freedom Schools, Afro-centric schools, Native American survival schools, Black Panther Liberation Schools. I have focused on race and ethnicity, but young people are also enmeshed in taken-for-granted narratives about gender, poverty, sexuality, and the operation of power in society. I suspect the groups that are doing the most effective work are moving on multiple fronts, as learning to think critically in one area facilitates thinking critically in others.5

5 For example, see Susan Wilcox’s “My Brother, My Sister, Myself: Critical Explorations of Sexism and Misogyny at the Brotherhood/Sister Sol,” in Payne and Strickland 2008.

13 Annenberg Institute for School Reform REFERENCES

Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: Adams , C., E. Robelen, and N. Shah. The Collapse and Revival of Ameri- 2012. “Civil Rights Data Show Reten- can Community. New York: Simon & tion Disparities,” Education Week Schuster. (March 6). Skiba, R. J., R. S. Michael, A. C. Baldwin, J. 1962. “As Much Truth as Nardo, and R. Peterson. 2000. The One Can Bear.” Reprinted in 2010 in Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected and Gender Disproportionality in Writings, edited by J. Baldwin and R. School Punishment. Policy Research Kenan, pp. 28–34. New York: Vintage Report #SRS1 (June). Bloomington, Books. IN: Indiana Education Policy Center. Baldwin, J. 1993. The Fire Next Time. Sleeter, Christine. 2011. The Academic New York: Vintage Books. and Social Value of Ethnic Studies: A Cobb, C. 1964. Mississippi Freedom Research Review. Washington, DC: School Curriculum: Memorandum to National Education Association. Freedom School Teachers. Jackson, Taylor, P., C. Funk, and A. Clark. MI: Student Nonviolent Coordinating 2007. Americans and Social Trust: Committee. Who, Where and Why. Washington, Gregory, A., R. Skiba, and P. Noguera. DC: Pew Research Center. Available 2010. “The Achievement Gap and for download at www.pewsocialtrends. the Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the org/2007/02/22/americans-and-social- Same Coin?” Educational Researcher trust-who-where-and-why. 39:59–68. Telles, E., and V. Ortiz. 2008. Gen- Harding, V. 1990. Hope and History: erations of Exclusion: Mexican Why We Must Share the Story of the Americans, Assimilation, and Race. Movement. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Books. Twain, M. 1889. A Connecticut Yan- Payne, C., and C. S. Strickland, eds. kee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: 2008. Teach Freedom: Education for Harper & Brothers. Liberation in the African-American Wong, C. A., J. S. Eccles, and A. Tradition. New York: Teachers College Sameroff. 2003. “The Influence of Press. Ethnic Discrimination and Ethnic Perry, T., C. Steele, and A. G. Hilliard Identification on African American III. 2003. Young, Gifted, and Black: Adolescents’ School and Socioemotion- Promoting High Achievement among al Adjustment,” Journal of Personality African-American Students. Boston, 71:1197–1232. MA: Beacon Press.

14 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Empowering Young People to Be Critical Thinkers: The Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson

Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir

A teacher and a student in Tucson’s acclaimed tion of powerful and poised faces of Mexican American Studies program, recently former students quickly flip through shut down by state and district officials, describe my mind, as they assertively and how the program has transformed the lives of its respectfully challenged the misconcep- tions and agendas of powerful political students and teachers. figures in Tucson and Phoenix. Along with them, I see the uncomfortable INTRODUCTION | CURTIS ACOSTA expressions of those políticos as they were held accountable to their con- The memories overwhelm me as stituency, to the voices, passion, and the question is posed, “What does dreams of our youth. For those of education for liberation look like in us who have struggled to save ethnic Tucson?” I see the marches, the vigils, studies and Mexican American Studies the teatro. I feel the music and voices (MAS) in Tucson, these occurrences of youth expressing their own view of have become a part of a beautiful tra- the world through their art. A collec- dition of education for liberation that

Curtis Acosta is a teacher in the Mexican American Studies Program at Tucson High Magnet School in Tucson, Arizona. Asiya Mir is a senior at Tucson High Magnet School, a student in the MAS program, and an organizer for UNIDOS, an activist group dedicated to the preservation and defense of Ethnic Studies.

15 Annenberg Institute for School Reform is handed from one cohort of students for our youth founded on the premise to another and will change our com- that the experiences, history, literature, munity forever. and art of Chican@s/Latin@s were a necessary and valid area for rigorous MAS was born from generations of academic exploration.2 systemic failure in educating Chican@/ Latin@ students in the Tucson Unified Many people throughout the nation School District and the dogged deter- have dedicated their time, energy, bril- mination of our elders and the rest liance, imagination, and love to our of our community to ensure an equal cause after witnessing the action of educational experience for our youth.1 our students on YouTube or follow- Our classes were products of the ing our story through media reports Chican@ Movement in the 1960s and a further grassroots effort in the 1990s to build an educational experience 2 Although empowering Latin@s is one of our major intentions, many diverse youth 1 For a description of the Mexican American have benefited from our classes – including Studies curriculum and its different Asiya Mir, my co-author for this article, programs, see the sidebar. who is a Pakistani-American.

ABOUT THE MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM The MAS program aims to use a comprehensive approach and integrated strategy for promoting academic success. Key elements are: Student support incorporates both intervention and prevention goals, creating a critical consciousness and an academic identity. Curriculum content brings Chicanos/Latinos and their cultural groups from the margin to the center and features cultural relevance, cultural competence, social justice emphasis, alignment with state standards, and academic rigor. The Social Justice Education Project is a two-year, student-led social research program in some TUSD American History and American Government classes that connects social research with curriculum (see www.socialjusticeproject.org). Chicano/a studies classes are taught as stand-alone classes and/or with co-teaching, depend- ing on the grade level. Teacher professional development uses a Latino Critical Race Theory framework to promote practices for educators that enhance the academic identity and achievement of all students, with an emphasis on Latino students in particular and students of color in general. The Mexican American Student Services Team offers professional development meetings throughout the school year; the Mexican American Student Services Summer Institute is a four-day conference that provides Chicana/o studies-based lessons and units to implement at all grade levels. Parent and community involvement, through the Ce-Ollin Parent Encuentros program, provides parents with the opportunity to hear children deliver presentations on their intellectual growth and helps parents develop a foundation for engaging in social justice, social transformation, and educational justice activities. Source: adapted from “Mexican American Student Services: Programs,” www.tusd.k12.az.us/ contents/depart/mexicanam/programs.asp.

16 Annenberg Institute for School Reform and blogs.3 The sidebar at the end of give me is the mental picture of what this article provides more informa- they are like on those first days and a tion about the events leading up to front row seat to their maturation as and following the banning of MAS in socially conscious scholars. I call it the January 2012. But what many people “before” picture. In many ways, those have never seen or been able to wit- early memories are filled with unique ness is the process of our classrooms qualities that make each of my stu- and the cultivation of liberated and dents special. empowered youth from the inside. Yet, there are also some common This was the challenge student-activist characteristics that many teachers of Asiya Mir and I received for how we urban, minority youth would recognize should approach this article, and in the if they were next to me as the first bell wake of the destruction of our MAS rang for the first day of class. The lives program in Tucson, it is a blessing and of our students outside the school gates our pleasure to be able to recall such are largely marginalized and ignored beautiful moments and experiences in in their daily school experiences. Our our classrooms. district invests little time and attention to neighborhood issues, socioeconomic IN LAK’ECH – YOU ARE MY realities, or the perspective and voice OTHER ME | CURTIS ACOSTA of youth who have their own ideas for transforming the world. This lack In Lak’Ech is the embodiment of our of empathy, commitment, and love MAS classes in Tucson and our guiding within the school halls and classroom principle as we engage in the beautiful spaces creates distrust, cynicism, and struggle that is learning and teaching. disengagement. Students are desperate It is a Mayan phrase that translates to for an education that reflects their lives “you are my other me.” Each day as and are starving for inspiration. class starts, my students and I would recite a verse from the poem of the I teach at the largest high school in our same name by award-winning Chicano district, one that is majority Latin@ playwright Luís Valdez (see the sidebar and nestled in downtown Tucson. In Lak’ech: You Are My Other Me Throughout the years, my students on page 19). It was a daily reminder have reflected upon why they took the for us all to remember how we should class and consistently expressed that embrace the world. selecting Mexican American Studies classes represented their last effort to The gift my students have provided give school a chance. This was it for me year after year is their presence them – the last possible chance that in my class and the honor of being the public school system would have their teacher. Since there is only one to inspire them to chase the elusive Chican@/Latin@ Literature teacher on American Dream. our campus, they all know what they are getting themselves into when they Many other students have articulated click the mouse during registration. the need and desire they had for an ed- But the secret joy that my students ucation experience that mirrored their culture. In these responses, students spoke candidly of the dearth of Chi- 3 See the “No History Is Illegal” campaign can@/Latin@ themes throughout their (www.teacheractivistgroups.org/Tucson); previous eleven years of schooling. the Save Ethnic Studies campaign (http:// saveethnicstudies.org); and Three Very few of those early-day reflections Sonorans: Progressive and Activist News in include themes of liberation, equality, Tucson and Arizona (http://threesonorans. and social justice. That is not to infer com).

17 Annenberg Institute for School Reform that the students do not have such can@ in Arizona. I was not involved in a consciousness – nothing could be my community and quite withdrawn further from the truth, as their actions into my own adolescent sphere. I was always prove while our days together adamant in my desire to graduate early, roll forward. partially because of my poor academic background, and more so, to shirk But the early responses are intimate higher education altogether. and personal. Our students look very similar to their counterparts through- While I instantly enjoyed myself out schools and communities that I through our writing assignments, have been fortunate to visit across the my earliest days in Mr. Acosta’s class nation. They are eager and hungry for consisted of me being slightly detached education that matters to them. This and softspoken the same way I was in is an important point to emphasize, my other classes. It became obvious since the media, and even fellow educa- to me as the weeks went on that this tors, often portray students of color as was not like any of my other classes. apathetic and nihilistic – that they lack Change occurred in me one day when the passion to actively engage in their I raised my hand for the first time and world. These are falsehoods meant gave input on rape victims and how to disempower students and teachers they are robbed of the intimacy in a from creating academic spaces together physical relationship. While I expected that are student-centered, liberating, this opinion to be met with victim and democratic, while restoring human blaming, my classmates were receptive dignity to their educational experi- and open. This was related to the book ences. Stories like ours are happening we were reading at the time, Always throughout the country. I hope that Running, easily one of the most enjoy- these stories provide an antidote to the able pieces of literature I have read in widespread cynicism toward urban mi- high school. Since that first year I like nority youth and show their potential to think I have evolved as a Chican@ to transform the world. Studies student and activist.

I saw the same changes occur in my RECALLING MY FIRST DAYS | classmates. People whose lives seemed ASIYA MIR to revolve around typical teenage woes steadily became more socially con- I first took Chican@ Studies as a surly scious. That is not to say we all entered sophomore determined to graduate the Mexican American Studies classes early after years in a school system that completely oblivious to social justice has continuously beat a desire to learn issues and politics, but it was in Mr. out of me and reinforced the idea that Acosta’s room that I saw myself and I am incompetent as a student, a com- fellow students grow into academically mon experience for students of color and politically driven individuals. Our in public schools. However, I consider space itself quickly became a “home myself very lucky because I had the op- away from home” for several of us, as portunity to take Chican@ Studies and it has in the past for previous genera- improve my relationship with educa- tions of students. tion, which is more than most students can say. The early days will always be my favorite time in Chican@ Studies because I entered the class unsure of what to they were so pivotal for the rest of our expect – a Pakistani-Caucasian, com- development both in there and in the pletely unfamiliar with the literature, rest of our high school careers. When let alone all the societal implications I dug up my notebook from that class my fellow students face of being Chi-

18 Annenberg Institute for School Reform IN LAK’ECH: YOU ARE MY OTHER ME

Luís Valdez and Domingo Martinez Paredes Luís Valdez, regarded as the father of Chicano theater, is a playwright, writer, film director, and founder of El Teatro Campesino, a farm workers’ theater troupe. The late Domingo Martinez Paredes was a professor at the National University of Mexico in the 1970s and the author of several books on Mayan thought and culture.

As a result of Arizona House Bill 2281 targeting the Mexican American Studies program, my plays have been banned in Tucson public schools, along with other works of Mexican American literature. I condemn this latest violation of American constitutional principles. I attribute it to a historic blindness and ignorance that will only embarrass the good people of Arizona for generations to come. Chicano Studies is quite simply the root of American Studies. Human history in this hemisphere does not begin in 1492 C.E. but rather in 3113 B.C.E. with the creation of the Mayan calendar, if not before with the Ancients in Peru. In Lak’Ech is a timeless Mayan precept I incorporated into a larger poem called “Pensa- miento Serpentino.” More specifically, I inherited In Lak’Ech directly from the late Professor Domingo Martinez Paredes of the National University of Mexico in the 1970s. He was the renowned author of several books on Mayan thought and culture, and I had the privilege of being personally tutored by him. The meaning of the phrase is affiliated with the Mayan definition of the human being, which they called “huinik’lil” or “vibrant being.” In this regard, we are all part of the same universal vibration. This was the origin of the recitation, excerpted from my poem, that celebrated our collective human being in Tucson’s MAS classes:

In Lak’ech Tú eres mi otro yo.

You are my other me. Si te hago daño a ti,

If I do harm to you, Me hago daño a mi mismo.

I do harm to myself. Si te amo y respeto,

If I love and respect you, Me amo y respeto yo.

I love and respect myself.

For a video clip of Curtis Acosta beginning a class with this recitation, please visit www.preciousknowledgefilm.com.

19 Annenberg Institute for School Reform I revisited early notes on the normal- rich in student voice. As a literature ization of whiteness and from one teacher, it was crucial for me to find particularly memorable class, an analy- engaging, provocative literature that sis on Islamic extremists who, as Mr. was relevant to the lives and experi- Acosta said, were dehumanized in the ences of my students. media. My notes read as being close to It was just as essential to include his exact words: culturally responsive works that were What point do you have to be at to reflective of the historical and contem- blow yourself up or crash a plane? porary context that makes Tucson and Look at the terrorists as humans. our Chican@/Latin@ cultura unique. I

Desperate. Loss of hope leads to knew that my students deserved better decisions that are less than human. than the literature anthologies that crowded the bookshelves at my school. It was at this point that I felt more I believed that I could build a literature

comfortable in my skin than ever curriculum that was not only rigorous before in school. Not only am I of a and challenging, but beautiful and in- toxicating. I was less concerned about presenting a historical perspective of “ literary movements than with finding literature that would inspire dialogue and generate ideas so powerful that my In forty-five minutes I felt more empowered students felt compelled to write. It was my belief that the literature could be and educated than I had in all my ten previ- the tool used to create a liberated class, where I became one voice of many in ous years in school. the discussion of the art and the social “ political context of the story (see the sidebar on page 16 for more about the MAS curriculum).

Pakistani-Caucasian background, but Although this type of empowerment my family members have also been within the classroom was new to my the direct victims of terrorism. At that students, they were willing to take point the very last thing I wanted to risks and leave the confines of their do was view the men who had killed seats to informally or formally pres- my cousins as being human. But that ent their own opinions and analyses class taught me the importance of of the literature. Students needed the forgiveness in incidents of violence. In time to develop trust and belief that forty-five minutes I felt more empow- our classes were different and that ered and educated than I had in all my we would not be promising the false ten previous years in school. charity of academic freedom, only to retreat to school policies or classroom procedures that reinforced the tradi- BUILDING ON CRITICAL tional school hierarchy of power. It CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE MAS was essential to provide evidence that CLASSROOM | CURTIS ACOSTA this was an entirely different kind of education at every conceivable instant. In order for students to believe that Whether it was through our morning the classroom can be a space of em- recitation that confirmed our respect powerment, liberation, freedom, and and love for one another, an edgy Ana autonomy, it is critical that educa- Castillo or Sherman Alexie story, or tors cultivate a learning environment

20 Annenberg Institute for School Reform analyzing the messages in the lat- characteristics needed to be civically est Mos Def flow, it was crucial that engaged and active in our community. literature study in our space needed to By reversing the traditional teaching have energy, be cool, and offer college roles, students were not only liber- preparatory experiences. ated to choose themes and activities that were more exciting and relevant As students became fully engaged in to their lives, they were also liberated the curricular experiences, the dialogue from the role of submissiveness, passiv- in the classes centered around how the ity, and domestication that is so often students were perceiving the literature the result of status quo educational and how they applied it to their own experiences. We referred to these class lives and the world around them. Thus, sessions as “students taking over the critical inquiry and pedagogy became space,” since this pedagogical practice the way for students to push each other gave students the experience and con- toward developing social conscious- fidence to develop their own voice and ness rooted firmly in themes of social organizational skills, which could then justice. Literature study in our classes be applied to the community outside became a lens to analyze our barrio, the classroom walls. school, or world and the platform for students to generate ideas for taking In our MAS classes in Tucson we have action to transform the inequalities in done this in a variety of ways. My their lives. literature classes where students engage in ethnographic research, create mono- An example of this was our annual logues, and perform an annual play for ethnographic research project inspired our community unearthed stories of by our reading of Radio Mambo by the our community that are often silenced. Chicano teatro group Culture Clash. Members of our afterschool student The project empowered students to organization Movimiento Estudiantil interview Tucsonenses whose story Chican@s de Aztlan developed the they felt embodied the idea of counter- Unity Festival, a daylong celebration narratives, transcribe the interview, of youth hip-hop culture, art, voice, and convert the transcriptions into and expression. Our process is inti- monologues that students would mate, personal, and generated from the perform in a theatric showcase for our young scholars themselves. There is no community. Thus, our students were other way. becoming scholars, historians, and artists who were living our history and making history. MY STUDENT ACTIVISM AND With that type of consciousness and CIVIC ENGAGEMENT | ASIYA MIR discourse as the central focus of study The story of my civic engagement is for our classes, the time was right to not solely my own – it belongs to the have students determine the direc- whole community, because they have tion of the class. This evolution of our supported the student movement at classroom was extremely important, every board meeting, walkout, or since it completely reversed the typical candlelight vigil. Students had many school experience as students designed an action like those, one of the most entire class sessions and became memorable being a creative attempt to the maestr@s. As students worked disrupt a board meeting with a card- in groups to develop the essential board coffin in which students placed elements needed to offer a quality edu- fake high school diplomas to represent cational experience for their peers, they the death of education. were also obtaining the qualities and

21 Annenberg Institute for School Reform It has always been apparent that our them as our dropout rates. We knew classes faced the threat of elimination. that direct action was necessary to In fact, there was a feeling that our stop our classes from being turned classes would eventually end specifi- into electives, and we succeeded in cally because they not only addressed the spring of 2011 by creating a delay the needs of students of color, but also through an occupation of the school empowered all of its participants. In board meeting.4 such an unstable situation, it became The resulting takeover was a highly clear that there was a need for student successful attempt to ensure the safety activism, which is what has kept us of our classes. While many community alive in the past. members reveled in the glory of this, During my junior year I became our actions came with complications. involved with a students’ grassroots The following school board meeting organization known as UNIDOS – resulted in the amplified presence of United Nondiscriminatory Individuals police personnel, a SWAT team, and Demanding Our Studies. We began as even immigration enforcement officers. a collective of diverse yet like-minded While the board meeting continued youth, from various high schools inside, conflict between the police and around Tucson, and were assisted protesters reigned. There were inci- through the facilitation skills of MAS dents of police brutality toward the alumni and community members. nonviolent protesters and supportive UNIDOS has always maintained the community members that scarred and objective of not only demanding, but shocked our community. also expanding ethnic studies. As a result of these experiences, the The months that followed were spent words from Dr. Martin Luther King learning about the dynamics of the Jr. from his “I Have a Dream” speech public school system and strategies seemed as relevant as ever: with which we could efficiently combat Some of you have come from areas the impending attacks on our classes. where your quest for freedom left We sought to make the headquarters of you battered by the storms of perse- Tucson Unified School District a more cution and staggered by the winds youth-oriented space where our voices of police brutality. You have been could be heard. While students inside the veterans of creative suffering. reigned over the designated time to for- Continue to work with the faith that mally address the school board, those unearned suffering is redemptive. of us outside, beneath the ironically placed indigenous symbols adorning King’s sentiments almost expel the the building, mounted student art and pain and simultaneously validate our testimonies, brought in local musicians, struggle. We too have continued to and set up open microphones. It was a fight since those monumental dates and wonderful juxtaposition to see break the abuse that we faced has made us dancers performing while security per- all the more resilient and determined to sonnel looked on uncomfortably. meet our goals. After years of student presence at board meetings and our compliance 4 In April 2011, the Tucson Unified School with the democratic process, it was District board introduced a resolution that clear that our voices remained invalid would have ended MAS's accreditation to meet core social science requirements. For to the majority of elected officials. Our more on the student takeover of the board experiences, opinions, spoken word, meeting, see www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff- and candlelight vigils were as trivial to biggers/arizona-ethic-studies_b_854161.html.

22 Annenberg Institute for School Reform THE ROAD TRAVELED | THE ROAD AHEAD | ASIYA MIR CURTIS ACOSTA

As my three years in the MAS space Regardless of the darkness that has have passed, I have witnessed my enveloped us since the decimation of brothers and sisters from multitudes our classes, our students still possess a of backgrounds overcome their own will to create and sustain social trans- personal and academic struggles. The formation. They are reflections of the expectations of us, as Chican@ Studies best part of being human: the ability students, far surpass those of other to empathize and advocate for those students, because we are expected to who struggle the most, while showing exceed our counterparts academically, resiliency and forgiveness to those who lest we are not taken as seriously, perpetuate inequality and propagate while we fight for our education as it the agenda of institutions that exploit is persecuted. youth and people of color. Regardless of legislative attacks and interven- The classes have introduced a new tion in our program, or the shameful way of living that involves the concept actions of our district in boxing and of In Lak’Ech – promoting not only banning our books, our students are self-love, but equal love for others. liberated and empowered to alter the We have carried this philosophy out future direction of our community and of the classroom and into our hearts state. I look forward to those beautiful and minds as we are blasted by hatred. days ahead. Indeed, it is often outside of school walls where our teachings are most needed. MAS students cannot escape the truth of our situation, which is that racist legislation outlaws empowering students, especially students of color. It is largely for this reason that we can’t help but be political in most of the mediums we pursue, whether they are hip-hop, writing, academics, illustra- tion, or activism.

However, life after the termination of our program has been surprisingly casual. We continue to go to what were formerly our ethnic studies classes, hes- itantly beginning the Unity Clap – our homage to the same rhythmic applause practiced by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Work- ers – and often quelling discussions that stray toward race, oppression, or feminism. My friends regularly browse through their phones to discover the latest derogatory rhetoric involving us, and student activism is as frequent a topic among us as any other. This behavior feels docile and muted. Our classes are no longer the vivid and free spaces they once were.

23 Annenberg Institute for School Reform ARIZONA STATE ACTIONS AGAINST THE MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM The Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) has been under attack by Tom Horne – then Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction – since 2006, when a keynote speaker at a Tucson high school, invited by MAS, made remarks critical of legislation passed by Arizona Republicans. Horne proposed legislation to ban ethnic studies programs, without success, in 2008 and 2009, ac- companied by widespread student and community protests and considerable media attention. (Ginwright & Cammarota 2011) In 2010, Horne promoted Arizona House Bill 2281, which prohibited classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” If a district was found in violation, the state could withhold 10 percent of its budget. On May 11, 2010, Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill into law, codified as ARS 15-111 and 112, unleashing another wave of student and community protests. In October 2010, eleven MAS teachers, later joined by two students, filed suit in the U.S. District Court against Superintendent Horne and the state board of education to stop the implementation of HB 2281 on the grounds that it violates their constitutional rights. (Caesar 2011; Cam- bium Learning and NAEP 2011; Siek 2012; Martinez 2012; Biggers 2012b; Ginwright & Cammarota 2011). On January 1, 2011, Horne – now attorney general – declared TUSD in violation of the new law. John Huppenthal, the new state superintendent of schools, ordered an inde- pendent curriculum audit of MAS. The audit by Cambium Learning Inc. and National Academic Educational Partners, released in May 2011, found no evidence of violations of ARS 15-112; on the contrary, the auditors had much praise for the program: No observable evidence exists that instruction within [the] Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment towards a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. MASD teachers are teaching Cesar Chavez alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, all as peaceful protesters who sacrificed for people and ideas they believed in. Additionally, all ethnicities are welcomed into the program and these very students of multiple backgrounds are being inspired and taught in the same manner as Mexican American students. (Cambium Learning and NAEP 2011, p. 55) In spite of these findings and considerable evidence that students in the program far outperformed their peers academically, in June 2011 Huppenthal ruled that MAS was in violation of the law. The school district appealed the ruling. In December 2011, an Arizona administrative law judge, Lewis Kowal, affirmed Huppenthal’s ruling in a non-binding recommendation, asserting that the auditors has only visited a few classes (Caesar 2011; Catone 2012; Sleeter 2012; Martinez 2012). In January 2012, threatened with the loss of $15 million of annual state aid, the Tucson school board voted to terminate the MAS program, once again amid massive protests. District officials removed copies of textbooks from classrooms and made unannounced visits to monitor compliance. The teachers, now without curriculum or textbooks, were given no clear guidelines on what was permissible to teach (Siek 2012; Biggers 2012b, 2012c; Martinez 2012).

24 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Ironically, Arizona’s actions against MAS have led to a national surge of media attention and support for the program. The shutdown of MAS and banning of textbooks unleashed a national outcry from educators, activists, researchers, authors of the banned books, librarians, and civil rights organizations, among others (Catone 2012; Siek 2012). Many have argued that the program not only should not be eliminated, it should be used as a model across the country because of its well-documented positive impact on student engagement and academic performance (e.g., Sleeter 2012; Catone 2012; Men- kart 2012). The national Network of Teacher Activist Groups has developed a curriculum guide, No History Is Illegal, based on the MAS curriculum and the events in Arizona, and nearly 1,500 educators have pledged to teach from it. The film Precious Knowledge, documenting the ways the MAS program has transformed its students’ lives, has been screened across the country and on public television (Catone 2012). U.S. Representa- tives Raúl Grijalva and Charlie Gonzalez of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus urged the U.S. Education Department to investigate the possible violation of federal civil rights standards. Grijalva said: This is not about one group of people wanting special treatment. This is about a successful educational program with a high graduation rate being shut down for purely ideological reasons. . . . Policy makers cannot look at history the way they look at items at a cafeteria, selectively picking what works for their agenda. (Herreras 2012) The controversy continued to deepen after TUSD board member Michael Hicks ap- peared on the national television news satire The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on April 2, 2012, and made what many described as embarrassing and blatantly racist statements (Daily Show 2012; Hing 2012; Biggers 2012a). Shortly after, the TUSD school board voted to fire MAS director Sean Arce – who only days before had won a history teaching award from the Zinn Education Project – in spite of two and a half hours of passionate testimony from students and community members in support of Arce and MAS (Men- kart 2012; Biggers 2012a; Zinn Education Project 2012). As this issue of VUE goes to press, the federal case against the constitutionality of ARS 15-112 is working its way through the courts, and three TUSD board members face tough reelective battles this year (Biggers 2012b). And as the struggle on the ground continues, Sean Arce finds grounds for optimism (Hing 2012): Our community is more assertive, politically active, organizing, getting out in the community. We are participating in electoral politics, getting people in office who are responsive to the needs of our communities. . . . Our youth are highly engaged, are highly committed to fight for social justice, to fight for equality. . . . The youth are not future leaders, they are current leaders, they’re courageous. It’s just unfortu- nate we can’t say that about our public officials, or our school board, or local school administrators.

Further Resources

No History Is Illegal: www.teacheractivistgroups.org/tucson Precious Knowledge: www.preciousknowledgefilm.com Save Ethnic Studies: http://saveethnicstudies.org

25 Annenberg Institute for School Reform REFERENCES

Biggers, J. 2012a. “Defying Commu- The Daily Show. 2012. “Tucson’s Mexican- nity, Split Tucson School Board Sacks American Studies Ban.” Video (April 2), Mexican American Studies Director Amid The Daily Show, www.thedailyshow.com/ Confusion,” AlterNet (April 11), http:// watch/mon-april-2-2012/tucson-s-mexican- blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2012/04/11/ american-studies-ban. defying-community-split-tucson-school- Ginwright, S., and J. Cammarota. 2011. board-sacks-mexican-american-studies- “Youth Organizing in the Wild West: director-in-total-confusion. Mobilizing for Educational Justice in Biggers, J. 2012b. “Day After in Tucson: As Arizona!” Voices in Urban Education 30 School Board Padlocks Program, Mexi- (Spring), www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/ can American Studies Will Rise Again in vue30-ginwright. Courts and 2012 Election,” Huffington Herreras. M. 2012. “Raúl Grijalva: Post (January 11), www.huffingtonpost. Investigate Attack on Mexican Ameri- com/jeff-biggers/tucson-mexican-american- can Studies,” Tucson Weekly (January studies_b_1199794.html. 24), www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/ Biggers, J. 2012c. “Books Gone, archives/2012/01/24/ral-grijalva-investigate- Tucson School Now Blocks the-attack-on-mexican-american-studies. Visit by Renowned Author Ana Cas- Hing, J. 2012 “Tucson’s Ousted Mexican- tillo,” AlterNet (April 27) http://blogs. American Studies Director Speaks: The alternet.org/Speakeasy/2012/04/27/ Fight’s Not Over,” Colorlines (April 27), books-gone-tucson-school-now-blocks-visit- http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/04/ by-renowned-author-ana-castillo. tucsons_ousted_mexican-american_studies_ Cambium Learning Inc. and National director_speaks_the_fights_not_over.html. Academic Educational Partners. 2011. Martinez, M. 2012. “Tucson School Board Curriculum Audit of the Mexican Ameri- Suspends Mexican-American Studies can Studies Department, Tucson Unified Program,” CNN U.S. (January 11), www. School District. Miami Lakes, FL: Cam- cnn.com/2012/01/11/us/arizona-mexican- bium Learning, Inc., www.scribd.com/ american-studies. doc/58025928/TUSD-ethnic-studies-audit. Menkart, D. 2012. “Zinn Education Proj- Catone, K. 2012. “Emulate, Don’t Elimi- ect Honors Sean Arce,” Zinn Education nate, Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Project (April 2), http://zinnedproject.org/ Program,” AISR Speaks Out: Commentary posts/17704. on Urban Education (March 16), http://annenberginstitute.org/commentary/2012/03/ Siek, S. 2012. “The Dismantling of emulate-dont-eliminate-tucsons-mexican- Mexican-American Studies in Tucson american-studies-program. Schools,” CNN: In America (January 22), http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/22/ Ceasar, S. 2011. “Tucson’s Ethnic-Studies how-tucson-schools-changed-after-mexican- Program Violates Arizona Law, Judge american-studies-ban/. Rules,” Los Angeles Times (December 27), http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/27/ Sleeter, C. 2012. “Ethnic Studies and the nation/la-na-tucson-mexican-american- Struggle in Tucson,” EdWeek (February studies-20111228. 15), www.edweek.org/ew/ articles/2012/02/15/21sleeter.h31. html?r=1752939306.

Prepared by Margaret Balch-Gonzalez, managing editor, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

26 Annenberg Institute for School Reform A Dialogue between Generations on Education for Liberation

Vincent Harding and Antonio Albizures with Adeola A. Oredola

A seasoned civil rights activist and scholar and a CULTURAL AND COMMUNITY young immigrant rights organizer dialogue about ROOTS how their generations can work together to create ANTONIO ALBIZURES a more democratic, multicultural, and just future. I came into this country at the age of one in the summer of 1992. My par- s the keynote presentation of ents originally came from Guatemala. the Free Minds, Free People I was born in Guatemala, actually. Aconference that took place in They came escaping a thirty-six-year July 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, civil war that was happening around Vincent Harding and Antonio Albi- that time. They chose to come to the zures held a dialogue, moderated by United States, which is portrayed to Adeola Oredola, on the mission of each other countries as a land of hope and of their generations in education for a land of opportunity. So my parents liberation. What follows are excerpts came pursuing the American Dream to from their conversation. provide me with a better future.

Vincent Harding is a historian, scholar, civil rights activist, and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Social Transformation at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, known for his close personal and professional relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Antonio Albizures is an immigration rights organizer at the Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition in Rhode Island and a teacher-mentor for at- risk youth in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Adeola A. Oredola is executive director of Youth In Action.

27 Annenberg Institute for School Reform I grew up here in South Providence world. I think that it is just magnifi- and graduated in 2009 from Black- cent that Mabel Harding, a welfare stone Academy, a charter high school mother who had only an eighth-grade in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. So Rhode education herself, believed enough in Island is my community; this is where the power of education that she kept I’m from. I have never had the oppor- pushing me, pulling me in that direc- tunity to be back in Guatemala due to tion. The other part of my earliest restrictions that immigration poli- development was in a little church cies have on me right now. Also I’m in Harlem where everybody in that involved in the right for undocumented church adopted me, took me in as their students to pursue higher education child, as their son, as their nephew, as once they graduate from high school. their student and taught me that I was Nationally and locally I’m involved capable of doing many things I would in the Federal DREAM Act and in the never have dreamed of. And there state legislation. again, the lesson for me is that we cannot become who we are meant to VINCENT HARDING be unless there’s community around us who believe in us, who are willing to I spent my childhood not far away encourage us, and who are willing to from here in Harlem and in the South move us forward. Bronx, New York. I, too, was the child of immigrants. My mother and father were born in Barbados in the West BECOMING AN ACTIVIST Indies, and they came to this country ANTONIO ALBIZURES shortly after the end of World War I. I feel a very close connection to what’s I can say that I am the activist that I going on here now partly because my am today due to prior experiences and life has been deeply affected by teach- my upbringing and due to mentoring ers; and from the beginning of my by a former organizer from Brown schooling, in kindergarten, in Harlem, University who passed away in May there were teachers who loved me, 2010. She was basically the poster believed in me, cared about me, and child for the federal DREAM Act. Her pushed me and pulled me forward, and name is Tam Tran. Unfortunately, she’s I can never speak adequately about not here with us any more. She was how important I understand teachers supposed to graduate this year with to be in the shaping of our lives and in a Ph.D. in American Civilization and helping us to become the human beings Ethnic Studies, but her life was cut we were meant to be. My sense is that tragically short in May 2010 in an ac- one of the deepest purposes that calls cident up in northern Maine. us into existence in this world is for us to help each other to figure out what it The most important thing I want our means to be human and for us to help community, the youth, our educators, each other to be more human. and all the amazing people who are at this conference today to know is that As I understand my own pathway, I the work we are doing, it’s already was affected also by Mabel Harding, a work that has started, and it’s up to us magnificent woman who shortly after I to go on with the work. It’s up to our was born became a single mother, and generation to lay down the foundation who, with an eighth-grade education, and to keep going for the future gen- determined that I would learn, that I erations, for our youth to keep going would grow, that I would go as far as I with that work that was started with could possibly go because she believed the Black freedom movement in the that I had something to offer to the South, with Dr. King, Malcolm X, Dr.

28 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Harding, and such. It’s our right to be in New York City on a book sign- educated, and it’s up to us to use educa- ing tour. But she said we could come tion as a form to liberate ourselves. and see if he could see us. We went to Montgomery and we had a wonderful VINCENT HARDING long conversation with him about what he was doing, what we were trying to A very transformative period of my life do. Then, at the end as we were about came when I was a graduate student to leave he said to us two Black guys, at the University of Chicago back in “You guys are part of one those peace the 1950s. I had just begun to learn churches. You know something about what was going on in the South, in the what we’re trying to do here in a non- movement of the South. I was a part, violent movement. You ought to come in Chicago, of an experimental church back down here and help us out some group in which we were trying to devel- time.” op an interracial church. In that group we kept saying to ourselves, “It’s great As a result of that, three years later, to say we are sisters and brothers and after I had been married for a year, my that we care about each other, and that wife, the late Rosemarie Harding, and I we want to serve each other, and that found our way back down to the South, we want to serve our community on the and we began to live in Atlanta right South Side of Chicago, but would we around the corner from Martin and do the same thing across racial lines if Coretta King. We began to be a part of we were in the South – especially in the that great movement which I do not call deep South? Is our faith in God, is our “a civil rights movement” but a move- belief in the teachings of Jesus, really ment for the expansion and deepening strong enough that we would do the of American democracy. A movement same thing in the South?” And some of for the transformation of this country. us finally said, “Let’s stop talking about Civil rights was one piece of it, but it. Let’s stop arguing about it. Why the transformation of human beings don’t we just go down there and see?” and society was a larger piece. There So five of us, three white guys and two is no way that I can account for the Black guys, packed into an old station next fifty-eight years of my life without wagon in the fall of 1958 and decided remembering that meeting with Martin we would just drive through the South King and the long history that we had – the deep South – and if at all possible together until he was assassinated. not allow ourselves to be separated There’s much more that I could say, but because we believed that we were that was where I began; and since that brothers and that we were not meant to time, I am perhaps most deeply moved be separated. After we passed through by remembering something that I heard Mississippi and got into Alabama, we back in the 1950s on the radio. I was said, “You know, we shouldn’t be in listening to a broadcast, and someone this state without trying to visit with being interviewed was a poet who had Martin Luther King, Jr.” We were down grown up in West Africa. And I heard in Mobile, Alabama, at first and went them say something about the struggles to a place where they kept the tele- that were going on there for a new phone books. And there it was, M. L. opportunity for new life in West Africa King in Montgomery, Alabama, and we and all over Africa. Then the poet called, just like that. said this: “I am a citizen of a country His wife, Coretta Scott King, answered that does not yet exist.” And increas- the phone and said that her husband ingly that’s the way that I feel. I am a was just recuperating from a bad citizen of a country that does not yet wound that he received being stabbed exist. And as I see it, my mind is free

29 Annenberg Institute for School Reform in order to create that new country. I were fighting to integrate students no am free from the past but free for the matter skin color, race, or ethnicity future, and I hope that all of you will to have an equal education. But have continue to join in the task of creat- we had an equal education? I would ing that which does not yet exist – a say a role model of mine is Geoffrey truly democratic, just, and multiracial Canada. He wrote a book called Fist, American society filled with schools Stick, Knife, Gun. He talks about his where children are taught how to be struggle and how he was able to create the best human beings that they can an opportunity zone, called the Harlem possibly be. Children’s Zone, with the education to equalize society. He said education is the greatest equalizer. Education will WHAT IS EACH GENERATION’S be used for us to liberate ourselves. MISSION? Now what we can do as students, as ADEOLA OREDOLA educators, as professors, is to achieve that moment when we are all receiving In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz the same education, because I believe Fanon said, “Each generation must we still aren’t there yet. discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it in relative opacity.” What do you VINCENT HARDING think is your generation’s mission when it comes to education and how One of the great missions at this point has it been fulfilled and betrayed? for the generation that I see coming up and the generation that I believe I ANTONIO ALBIZURES exist to encourage (for me one of the major roles of elders is to encourage I attended public education here in those who are doing the work of this Providence, Rhode Island, and I gradu- generation) – the important work for ated in Pawtucket. Providence and you folks and for my generation is to Pawtucket are the two biggest cities in recognize that we are in a very different Rhode Island, which is like the size of situation now than we were even when my hand. My family chose to move out I was in school in the thirties and for- to a small suburb outside of the city, ties. We are in the midst of what may predominantly white, and the public well be a diminishing empire that no education right there – the education longer can tell the world what to do, that my siblings are receiving – is in can no longer dominate the world, and no way, shape, or form equal to the must learn how to live with the world education that’s given to the urban rather than to push the world around. communities, even though it is public education and it is funded by our tax It seems to me that our mission now is money. We are not receiving an equal to figure out, How do we develop the education. In our community we are education that will not make us com- not receiving the same because we have petitive with China, but an education outdated textbooks. We don’t have the that will make us more human beings? same technology. We don’t have the Right now I think that part of that job same things that my brothers or my is for the kind of conversation that you siblings who live just five minutes away and I and Adeola are trying to have from the city do. here, for this kind of a conversation to open up in as many places as we can In l954 in the decision of Brown v. possibly encourage it to take place. Board, when education was integrated, that’s what we were fighting for. We You and I, for instance, certainly know that at this point in history that Black

30 Annenberg Institute for School Reform people and Brown people must be I came back to my community angry talking together, but we are posed as about my experience and so one of the threats to each other. We are discour- things I did was join the school board aged from recognizing that we have right out of college. I tried to bring my great connections with each other. And experiences and what I heard from it seems to me that one of the great my peers to policy making. And I think missions of the educational agenda that that doesn’t happen enough and for this next period is to help us to it was a scary experience, but it was figure out how we are connected to one that really helped me to channel each other. What are the connections back anger. between our various stories, now that So, I do think that we need to be the we have given up on the old dominant decision makers, but what I’ve found, white story that this society was trying Dr. Harding, is that I don’t have to put on us? What is that new story? enough mentors around. I’m looking And quiet as it’s kept, I feel that white for people to support me to get to the Americans who want to know what it next level and I think it’s hard as young means to be human must enter into this people especially, but then as people in new conversation as well, because the my generation, the thirty-somethings, American education that we consider to find people to look up to. Often- to be so wonderful has not been won- times people leave communities that derful at all. It has put white people need the most help, so you can’t find in a frame of mind to think that there those mentors. is something that is really wonderful about being white, and that is not a good thing. That is the miseducation of “ white people. And so we all have a new agenda to help each of us, all of us, to figure out how we can become really Black people and Brown people aware of our connections to each other, of what we have to teach each other, of must be talking together, but we are what we have to learn from each other, of how we can walk together, and how posed as threats to each other. we can create this country that does not yet exist. That, I think, is a task “ that we all have together at this next stage. That’s why we’re free now – free to create that which does not yet exist. VINCENT HARDING ADEOLA OREDOLA I fully agree with you that we cannot I went to high school right across the be who we are meant to be as long as street at Central High School. The elders and young people keep separate school has come a long way since then lives apart from each other. As far as but I had an experience of having I understand the history of the human teachers that slept through class and race, we are at our best when we didn’t teach me and found myself not operate together. When young people knowing algebra and how to write and elders respect, love, and care or read properly by the time I was a for each other and recognize that each senior. I left high school, made it to has something to teach the other, it college, struggled through college but is in that context that we’re able to finished, and I left frustrated. move forward.

31 Annenberg Institute for School Reform One of the things that I encourage together in coalition to better our- people to do is to develop situations selves, to liberate ourselves [see Figure where young people can, with a small 1 for a depiction of demographic camera, with a small mic, interview changes]. Diversity is important and elders who’ve been involved in move- it’s beautiful because we’re here to ment, in social change, and activities learn from each other. Each of our in teaching. To have young people upbringings, education, ideologies, actually sit with elders in an informal and culture is so different that we or formal way and ask them: “Please will never be able to learn everything tell me about your life. What did you at once. So if we take bits and pieces do to get started in what you’re doing from each other and form a coalition now? What kept you going in hard or work together in unity, then we will and tough situations? What would you never be a minority. And in reality, do differently if you were just start- what are we? We all are humans. We ing out now?” To get young people all are one. We are the same person together with elders asking those kinds whether we’re light-skinned, Asian, of questions really does great things indigenous, or whatever, we are one. both for the elders and for the young From a student perspective, diversity is people. So I would recommend very something that we should cherish and strongly that wherever you can get uphold, especially in our communities, elders and young people together and and we should stop building up walls get elders to tell their stories by young or setting up divisions between our people asking their questions, there is own communities. something very vital and very exciting that can take place as far as teaching is VINCENT HARDING concerned there. One of the things that I feel we need to figure out in a setting like this and RACE, DIVERSITY, AND in the places we go away to from here “MINORITIES” is that we need to take on – without being afraid, without being worried about ANTONIO ALBIZURES how we do it, but just trying – we need A big problem, not only with education to talk about this matter of race. but with any social justice issues that Now, for me, we cannot be free people we’re trying to conquer is conform- with free minds unless we examine this ism – accepting what is given to us. matter of what it means, for instance, I believe we should take the Socratic to be white and teaching young people approach and question: “Why is this of color. How do we free ourselves to so? Why should I accept what’s given be able to take on that tough issue? to me?” We should not just stand back How do young people of color free and be silent, because silence is consent ourselves to be able to speak to the un- for the oppressor. Silence is consent to clarities and uncertainties that we have divide the minorities, to divide us as about all of that? I would hope that a individuals, and to keep us conformed setting like this one and the other con- with how society is. And that’s not ferences that we represent would really where we should stand. encourage us to just honestly, lovingly, Minorities is an old term. If you look openly engage each other around this at the new census, the only way they issue of who are we, and where did we actually claim us to be minorities is come from, and how do we connect by dividing us, splitting us apart. In with each other, how do we discon- reality, we are a majority if we work nect, and how can we make up for the

32 Annenberg Institute for School Reform disconnections? All of those things, it is to each other, and we also are going seems to me, are absolutely necessary to need to recognize that because of in order for us to have the kind of new the new time, some people are scared society that we are believing must take to death, because a new America is place in this country. emerging that they never expected and were not and are not prepared Someone briefly mentioned that old, for. How do we create an educational old word, “minorities.” Look at the system that will prepare us all for the census data that’s more and more new America that’s already being born? coming up over these years and ask: Let’s see if we can do it. I think that Who are minorities in America? We are that’s who you are – the makers of the living in a new time when clearly we’re new education for the new America. going to need new language to describe And I’m going to hang around as long who we are and what our relationship as I can to see what you do.

AMERICA WILL BE A MAJORITY PEOPLE-OF-COLOR NATION BY 2042

Demographic Composition of the U.S., 1970-2050

100% 4% 2% 3% 3% 3% 3% 4% 4% 4% 7% 4% 5% 6% 6% 7% 90% 11% 9% 8% 13% 12% 16% 12% 20% 80% 23% 12% 27% 31% 70% 12% 12% 12% 60% 83% 12% 12% 80% 50% 76% 40% 69% 64% 59% 30% 54% 20% 50% 45% 10%

0% 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

Non-Hispanic White Black Latino Asian Other

FIGURE 1. DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN THE U.S., 1970–2050

Note: “Other” includes all persons who are not included among other groups shown, and includes non-Latinos who identify racially as being Native American or Alaska Native, some other race alone, or multiracial. Source: PolicyLink/PERE analysis of Statistical Abstract of the United States (1970 and 1980); U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses (1990 STF3, 2000 SF3, and 2010 SF1); U.S. Census Bureau Population Projections, 2008 (2020-2050), adjusted using the results of the 2010 Census. This figure is reprinted with permission from The Color of Change: Inter-Ethnic Youth Leadership for the 21st Century, by M. Pastor, R. Ortiz, J. Ito, V. Terriquez, V. Carter, J. Tran, and T. Cheng, Program for Environmental & Regional Equity, University of Southern California, 2010. The full report is available online at http://college.usc.edu/pere/publications/index/cfm.

33 Annenberg Institute for School Reform FREE MINDS, FREE PEOPLE CONFERENCE 2013: SALT LAKE CITY

Matthew Bradley

Matthew Bradley was assistant professor for the Honors College at the University of Utah, where he led the Honors Social Justice Scholars, the Honors Think Tank on Social Change, and the Mestizo Arts and Activism program. He also taught honors classes at AMES High School.

Editor’s Note: It is with great sadness that we report the news of Matthew Bradley’s death in an accident shortly after he completed this sidebar. Please see the dedication page for more about Matthew.

In 2007 a small group of educators and students from Salt Lake City, Utah, traveled to the first Free Minds, Free People (FMFP) conference in Chicago, Illinois. Our goal was to attend the presentations and present workshops and discussions on the video documentary work we were working on around issues of immigrant rights and racial discrimination in public schools. It was a transformative experience for us. We were inspired, motivated, and moved by the other presentations, dialogues, plenary sessions, and performances in which we participated. So much so that one of the youth in our group volunteered to be a part of the FMFP planning committee for the Houston conference that followed in 2009.

We had such a powerful and empowering experience at the Chicago conference that when the call for presentations for Houston was announced we encouraged many of the organizations in Salt Lake City with whom we have connections to submit propos- als. Most of them were accepted, and so we raised $15,000 to hire a bus and make the thirty-hour bus ride with forty-five students, parents, educators, and artists from Salt Lake City to Houston. Again, it was an amazing experience both to be able to share our work and to connect with others from around the country who are similarly engaged in seeking to transform our educational spaces into more democratic and liberatory learning environments.

On the bus ride home, before we had even made it out of Texas, many of us were talking about how exciting it would be to bring FMFP to Salt Lake City. It wasn’t long after we got home that we started the application process, so we couldn’t be happier now to have been selected to host the 2013 conference.1

Salt Lake City is a bit of a paradox. It has historically been white and conservative and has its share of racist and homophobic legislation and policies. But is also has a vibrant LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) community (Salt Lake City was even named the “gayest city” in the U.S. by The Advocate magazine, albeit using a somewhat non-scientific system) and numerous active and thriving political and activist

1 The FMFP conference is held every two years. The 2011 conference took place in Providence, Rhode Island.

34 Annenberg Institute for School Reform groups that work hard for more equal opportunities in educational, social, and economic spheres. Salt Lake City is classified as an “emerging gateway” city because of its burgeoning immigrant and refugee communities, and many of the schools in Salt Lake School District have majority minority populations. The Salt Lake Valley also hosts one of the largest Pacific Islander communities outside of the Pacific Islands.

We look forward to hosting our FMFP brothers and sisters in Salt Lake City, both for the opportunity to show off some of the incredible work that is happening here, and to continue to learn from and be invigorated by the work of others. FMFP has provided so much inspiration and encouragement, as well as such an important space for critical dialogue and thought, that we hope to contribute with the same energy and success as Chicago, Houston, and Providence.

Flor Olivo and Caitlin Cahill

Flor Olivo is a mother of three and community member in Salt Lake City. She is managing editor of the West Views Community Newspaper and co-editor of Venceremos Student Newspaper. Caitlin Cahill teaches at the City University of New York. She formerly co-directed the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective in Salt Lake City with Matt Bradley and David Quijada.

Salt Lake City is an especially critical space for youth activism because there is so much work to do. Utah is one of the “reddest,” most conservative states in the country and also one of the whitest. But this is changing as Utah is undergoing massive demographic changes. It is notable that political and public debates over immigration status, schooling, geographic boundaries, and states’ rights have become increasingly hostile as Utah’s almost 90 percent white majority has decreased in the past ten years. Recently, for example, the Utah State Legislature passed the controversial “Show Me Your Papers” racial profiling legislation (modeled after Arizona’s State Bill 1070). It is within this context that we organize and youth activists take great risks for social justice for all. To- gether youth activists, community members, students, and artists organize to collectively transform our community and create equitable conditions.

We have strong, sustainable community partners who take seriously young people’s commitments to social change and who have been supportive of our efforts in concrete, material ways – for example, supporting us to go to Houston, Texas, for Free Minds, Free People 2009, with very little notice. While we are thankful to all funders near and far who have supported our work over the years, we work most closely with local partners who know us intimately. Salt Lake City is a small place where you cross paths frequently, and over time we have seen each other grow up. Our community partners share our commitment to educational and immigration rights and at times even engage with us in the struggle. Local community-based organizations who we work closely with include the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective, the Brown Berets, the FACE movement, the University of Utah, University Neighborhood Partners, and the ACLU of Utah, among others.

35 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Our community is thrilled to host a national conference, as we know it’s an exciting way to share and learn from each other. Community partners are stepping up to support the Free Minds, Free People conference in all kinds of ways, from donating space and organizing events to supporting the conference through funding. This feels especially important now in honor of Matt Bradley’s legacy, as it represents another opportunity to engage more folks in the struggle for social justice.

The Free Minds, Free People conference has different meanings for each of its participants. But for many in Salt Lake City, it provided a much-needed space for our experiences to be valued as students, educators, and activists, which created a very deep bond. The long bus ride to Houston was an opportunity for the Salt Lake City activists to practice the essence of our work. We bonded on issues of social justice that we were all deeply passionate about – for example, ways to better organize our youth groups and ideas on better representation of our communities in the media, among others. We were able to forget our everyday worries, tell stories, sing, and build community. Many of our misunderstandings washed away, and we were able to see a vision of our city where we could all work together. Through the preparation process and later, in presenting, we were able to see the intersections of our struggles with racism, homophobia, patriarchy, classism, environmental justice, and other issues.

At the conference, from one day to another, our volunteer work acquired greater meaning and value in the world. The work and knowledge of our students and youth acquired significance as we absorbed the work of others throughout the country, because we saw others fighting for the same things. The voices of educators and mentors began to ring in our minds as we distributed our student newspapers, networked our ideas, and added our creativity and art. The words and work we had been told were going to change the world began to gain meaning to others. The Brown Berets and FACE Movement workshop was one of the most popular at the conference, and attendance increased throughout the presentation and activities. We had a shirt spray paint activity where each person could make a shirt representing their struggles. The last day of the conference we saw students from all over the country wearing our shirts.

The FMFP experience wasn’t a temporary high or something any of us will easily forget. Education for liberation is an essential tool for restructuring our growing city. Recently with the passing of our beloved comrade, Matt Bradley, it has become even more special and important to share this understanding with his much-loved home state. These experiences have influenced our hearts, and we are excited to bring these types of memories and knowledge to our friends and family as we welcome the new family that the Free Minds, Free People community has become to us.

36 Annenberg Institute for School Reform Education is Under Attack! What Do We Do? Stand Up! Fight Back! Teacher Activism in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Bree Picower

Teacher activists engaged in the Occupy the DOE into his microphone on the stage to a movement in New York City are working to end the room of more than 200 parents, teach- oppression standing in the way of a more just soci- ers, and students, the audience echoes ety, both inside and outside the classroom. the young teacher’s call and bellows back, “MIC CHECK!” The response fills the auditorium, drowning out the “ ic Check!” shouts a teacher chancellor’s speech and focusing all who stands up from her eyes on the teacher who stands in the Mseat in a crowded audito- middle of her row facing the people rium and turns her back to the Panel she considers her allies. for Educational Policy that is arranged With a resolute yet high-pitched voice on the stage of a public high school filled with emotion and determination, in New York City. Although Schools she continues: “The Panel for Educa- Chancellor Dennis Walcott has already tional Policy,” she yells, looking at the convened the meeting and is speaking

Bree Picower is a core member of the New York Collective of Radical Educators, assistant professor of early childhood, elementary education, and literacy education at Montclair State University, New Jersey, and author of Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom (Routledge, 2012).

37 Annenberg Institute for School Reform crowd, who without missing a beat, TEACHER ACTIVISM echo her words back to her: This action was organized by a group “THE PANEL FOR EDUCATIONAL connected to the Occupy Wall Street POLICY” (OWS) movement called Occupy the Department of Education, or Oc- “Claims to be a democratic forum” cupy the DOE (O-DOE). Many of the “CLAIMS TO BE A DEMOCRATIC people who participate in this group FORUM” are already activists within a variety “For parents, teachers, and students!” of grassroots groups involved in the “FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND struggle for educational justice in New STUDENTS!” York City. As a member of one such group, the New York Collective of “They make their decisions” “THEY Radical Educators, I, too, have partici- MAKE THEIR DECISIONS” pated in some of O-DOE actions and “Way before coming here” “WAY work alongside other teacher activists BEFORE COMING HERE” involved. I interviewed seven such educators to learn more about the issues “Regardless of what people have to that galvanized them to participate in say” “REGARDLESS OF WHAT this movement and what they hoped PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY” their actions would accomplish. All “This is not a democracy!” “THIS IS of the participants work in New York NOT A DEMOCRACY!” City public schools and were interviewed within the first three months of Electrified by the power of their unified the OWS movement. voice, the audience erupts in cheers, while the members of the panel and To understand what drove the teacher their invited guests stare down at the activists (TAs) to participate in O- crowd like deer in a headlight, trying DOE, it is important to clarify some to figure out how to take back control of the characteristics of educators who of their carefully orchestrated “hear- are also involved in activism. In some ing” (at which parents have previously of my previous work (Picower 2012), I been informed that their avenue for outline three commitments that typify being heard is to write their comments teacher activism. The first commitment on notepaper that will be collected). is to reconcile a vision of a socially just This “people’s mic” drowns out the world with the realities of inequality sound system of the panel while parent that TAs see around them. Part of what after teacher after student stands up to drives this commitment of reconcili- voice their concerns about the anti- ation is the fact that TAs believe that democratic nature of the New York education can be both liberatory and City Department of Education (DOE). oppressive at the same time. Rather Finally, the chancellor and the rest of than acknowledge one of these func- the appointed body of panelists walk tions and ignore the other, TAs make out of the auditorium in frustration additional commitments to address to convene their meeting upstairs with both the liberatory and oppressive less than fifty audience members in nature of schooling. tow, while at least 200 remain in the The second commitment is to cre- auditorium for the next two hours to ate liberatory spaces in their roles as truly “hear” from the people affected classroom teachers. Through develop- daily by the education system – the ing caring relationships and democratic parents, teachers, and students. spaces, TAs work toward their vision of liberation by delivering culturally

38 Annenberg Institute for School Reform NEW YORK COLLECTIVE OF RADICAL EDUCATORS POINTS OF UNITY

New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) is a group of public school educators committed to fighting for social justice in our school system and society at large, by organizing and mobilizing teachers, developing curriculum, and working with community, parent, and student organizations. We are educators who believe that education is an integral part of social change and that we must work both inside and outside the classroom because the struggle for justice does not end when the school bell rings.

POINTS OF UNITY

1. Racism and economic inequality in the school system reflect and perpetuate the sys- tematic and historical oppression of people of color and working class communities. As educators in the New York City public school system we have a responsibility to address and challenge these forms of oppression. 2. In order to combat economic, social, and political systems that actively silence women and people of color, we are committed to maintaining majority women and people of color representation in our group. 3. We oppose the current policy of high stakes standardized testing because it reflects the standards and norms of dominant groups in society, it is an inaccurate and incom- plete assessment of learning, and it stifles pedagogical innovation and active learning. 4. Punitive disciplinary measures such as “Zero Tolerance” further criminalize youth and are not an answer to crime and other social problems. We believe economic and social priorities should be toward education of young people and not incarceration. 5. We oppose the increased efforts of military recruitment in New York City public schools. These efforts unfairly target the recruitment of low-income communities and make false promises about educational and career opportunities. We believe that these efforts are an extension of an imperialistic strategy to maintain a powerful military force in order to protect and promote U.S. world dominance. 6. New school funding policies must be adopted in order to ensure equitable resources for all. Current policies based upon property taxes discriminate against low-income communities and urban areas, which disproportionately affect people of color. 7. Schools must be safe spaces for females and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) individuals. Verbal and physical abuse targeting these groups is extremely prevalent in most schools, and cannot be tolerated and must be challenged by all faculty, staff, and administrators. 8. Schools should be places of questioning and critical thinking that encourage students to see themselves as active agents of change. The present educational system is derived from an assembly line model that stifles critical thinking by focusing on the regurgitation of facts and information. 9. Schools should provide a neighborhood space through which community voices are heard. Teachers are an integral part of this space and must be held accountable to the community by being involved in addressing community needs. Reprinted with permission from the New York Collective of Radical Educators, www. nycore.org/nycore-info/points-of-unity.

39 Annenberg Institute for School Reform relevant, community-responsive peda- However, in keeping with the com- gogy that helps students develop their mitment to reconcile this vision of own political analysis and the skills to democratic decision making with the take action. reality around them, the TAs were quick to name all the ways in which In the third commitment, TAs stand up this vision was debased within the cur- to oppression by engaging in ongoing rent context. All of the TAs interviewed and collective action to rally against the shared a common analysis about the ways that schooling reproduces existing problems of the social and educational inequalities and maintains the status system, critiquing the lack of democ- quo. In their view, to engage in libera- racy in a society in which people with tory pedagogy inside of the classroom the most wealth exert disproportional without fighting injustice outside of influence over decisions and policies it would be inadequate in reconciling that affect all. This includes an analysis their vision of the world they wish to of the ways in which corporations and see. As Ella, a math teacher, expressed: privatization are unraveling the very I have to work to make a better nature of the public sphere. system. . . . I know that I’m doing They applied this broader analysis to good for [my students] but my day education, looking specifically at how is filled with so much inane stuff mayoral control in New York City that is such a waste of my time and plays out. As Alexandra explained: money that should be going to my students’ education. I feel I would There’s the 99 percent, and then go crazy if I didn’t try to change [the there’s the 1 percent. This [analysis] larger system] in some way. really resonates with most people’s experiences in the Department of This article shows how the TAs who Education, where people feel like participate in OWS and O-DOE stand students, teachers, and parents, who up to oppression and work to change make up the vast majority of public the system that Ella described by rec- education, feel like they have little onciling their vision of a socially just voice or decision-making power in system with the reality of what they what our schools look like. feel to be a bankrupt, undemocratic dictatorship. By looking through the lens of economic and power disparity, Alexandra recognized the same trend within the “EDUCATION IS UNDER field of education and how school ATTACK” policy is shaped. She continued:

In their vision of a more just world, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor the TAs all believed that the people Walcott seem to make almost all of who are affected by the system should the decisions on public education, be the ones who make democratic and so that kind of framework of decisions about how education should the 99 percent versus the 1 percent function. As Alexandra, a high school really made a lot of sense in public educator, stated: education.

I believe that students, teachers, They noted a shift to corporate control and parents should collectively run and management of schools under education. I think that all decisions Mayor Bloomberg’s reign and contend that are made about our schools that educational decisions are made should be the decisions made by the based on profits over children’s needs. people who actually attend and run those places. Adding to their analysis of the anti- democratic nature of education under

40 Annenberg Institute for School Reform mayoral control, the TAs pointed As exemplified here, the disconnect to the Panel for Educational Policy between the reality of inequality faced (PEP). The PEP was set up as an by students and the vision TAs want advisory board, but the majority of for them is what drives Alexandra and panelists were appointed by Bloom- others to action. berg, who has been known to fire members who don’t intend to vote in the direction he wants (Herszenhorn “WHAT DO WE DO?” 2004). The TAs lamented the lack of It was within this context of economic voice or power of parents, students, crisis, extreme disparities of wealth, and teachers under this “puppet and increased grassroots organizing panel.” Niki, who teaches immigrant that the Occupy Wall Street Move- high school students, explained: ment (OWS) was born. The teacher The students, parents, and teach- activists, already active organizers ers will come and pour their hearts in the social and educational justice out until four in the morning, and worlds, were drawn to this movement panelists will sit there and act like because it called into question the they are listening, but they still vote economic injustice that their students the way they were going to before faced, along with the very foundation they even walked in the door. of the corporate capitalist system. As Niki explained: The TAs believed that under mayoral control, with the PEP and chancellor I think there is another way. I see appointed by one person, key stake- every day with my students how holders have no avenues in which to the odds are stacked against them, be heard. and this is the first movement in my lifetime that feels like people are Ultimately, the TAs understood challenging that. how students suffer from economic injustice inside and outside of schools. This movement provided an op- Alexandra described, portunity for Niki and the others to re-imagine their vision of a different My students face massive unem- system in which direct democracy and ployment, families face evictions, consensus building are part of both students come to school hungry, the process and product of change. tired because they work night shifts, living below the poverty line. Along with the critique OWS offered, the TAs were also attracted to Seeing these issues firsthand gave her the way in which the structures and a sense of empathy. She said: processes of the movement provided people with a voice, a voice that had When you are confronted with been silenced in the undemocratic that every day, not always in your system they struggle against. Sucre, personal life, but when you see it an elementary teacher, reflected upon among the young people you work how she felt at OWS: with, you realize how little chance they have been given from the start. I feel like I’m not being silenced. No one is telling me: “You can’t For TAs like Alexandra, empathy talk because you are a person of turned to solidarity: color, because you are an educator, It certainly makes you even more because you are working class.” outraged and much more willing OWS created a space and introduced to fight on their behalf, but also on the TAs to tools such as the people’s yours, because you feel connected.

41 Annenberg Institute for School Reform mic, general assemblies, and consensus process of talking everything out and building that allowed them to put into thinking about it and making your practice the direct democracy they argument and having someone else craved. Niki explained the appeal of respond to it and having conversa- the people’s mic: tions that way, you build consensus to the end point where everyone has We can rely on each other to project come to an agreement that this is the our voices. We can just take any decision that makes the most sense. space and make it ours as long as we have enough people, and that is a Galvanized by these new types of metaphor for organizing. conversations and strategies, the TAs re-approached their education activism Because the vision of justice the TAs with new energy. They soon realized, subscribed to included parents, teach- however, that while they shared an ers, and students having democratic economic analysis with many of the power in decision making, they were people at OWS, the broader group did immediately drawn to such tools that not apply this lens to the field of educa- allowed people’s voices to be heard. tion. Ella recounted: The TAs reported that they were Because OWS was challenging initially skeptical that “young white corporate interests in every aspect kids” would overrun the OWS space of our society . . . it seems to make but came to acknowledge that while sense that it would start to challenge it was not immune to reproducing education. To me, that connection oppressive patterns, OWS was open to is very clear. But then I realized that all who chose to participate. Samuel, people in OWS weren’t really talk- an English as a second language ing about that. It wasn’t coming up. teacher, explained: Even the “education subcommittee” I really saw it as . . . counter insti- that was convened spoke more to tutional to have a space like this, so higher education and did not seem it opened our eyes in terms of not to be leaning toward issues of public criticizing as much because really education and injustice. anybody can do anything there if they want to. Samuel saw OWS as a resource and an inspiration but was also quick to name Sarah, a government and economics what he saw as the differences between teacher, continued: the OWS activists and the “radical People feel empowered to take it educators of New York” of which he and run with it. It’s sprawling and felt a part. He explained: not specific, but it is also owned; They don’t really know who the people feel ownership over it in so chancellor is, they don’t know many ways. anything about our specific struggle With this sense of empowered owner- here – the education stuff, which is ship, the TAs were able to participate logical. Pretty much nobody knows in new ways of meeting, such as con- except for the people, us, who have sensus building. As Ella extrapolated: been involved.

While people may be critical of con- While the TAs felt they found a move- sensus, what they don’t understand ment that shared their overall political is that what comes before consensus analysis, they recognized the way in is consensus building. Through the which it was not a seamless fit. process of conversation, through the

42 Annenberg Institute for School Reform “STAND UP!” In Occupy the DOE, we’re seeing a lot more teachers coming in than In the meantime, different teacher ac- a few months ago, so it’s happening tivist groups in the city started holding . . . . Just knowing that you can be grade-ins at Zuccotti Park as an act of part of something bigger, and you’re solidarity, to make public the private seeing other people come together, work of teachers and to create a space it’s a powerful feeling. for teachers within the movement. Within these grade-ins, conversations With the energy, vocabulary, and tools between educators began to take shape. drawn from OWS, a larger group of Ella recalls a conversation she had with teachers, students, and parents were Alexandra, who said to her: drawn into the mix and began to participate in new conversations about You know, if someone’s going to economic injustice and educational re- make the education subcommittee, form. O-DOE began organizing actions it’s going to have to be us, the activ- that drew larger and larger numbers ists who are already doing it. and garnered more press. The TAs and Ella described her reaction: others became increasingly inspired and transformed by each other and by It was a lightbulb moment. It’s not these actions. As the movement con- going to be something that we tap tinued to build, the TAs became more into; it’s going to be something we and more motivated and empowered to invent. We have to make that hap- continue to fight for change. pen, because we are the ones already working on educational justice. We’re the ones already working to “FIGHT BACK!” fight corporate interest in education. Through the creation and actions of In keeping with the commitments of O-DOE, the TAs developed a stron- teacher activism, they began to put into ger sense of solidarity and collective place the vision they had for what the presence. Rather than waiting for struggle for educational justice could someone else to create change, the TAs look like. As well-connected organizers acted, and it was both the process and within the local scene, now armed with product of their actions that they saw the tools and strategies picked up from as part of a liberatory movement. As OWS, the TAs, along with parent and described in the introduction to this student activists, took up the charge, article, the TAs decided to use a Panel as Niki avowed, to “bring the spirit of for Educational Policy (PEP) meeting Occupy Wall Street to the education as a target for their first action in an at- movement.” As a result, they created a tempt to expose the lack of democracy group connected to but not necessarily of the PEP and mayoral control. Sarah part of OWS called Occupy the DOE described her reaction to this event: (O-DOE). The unifying element of all this Through O-DOE, the TAs worked to work is demonstrating the power bring in representative voices of diverse of regular people and that we now parents, students, and teachers, par- believe that we have power if we ticularly attracting new people into the act together. That’s the key tenet of existing activist work going on in the any social movement: the power in city, which they found exciting. Xio- numbers. mara, an elementary teacher, explained By acknowledging this power and the development: working to bring in more parents, students, and teachers, the TAs believe

43 Annenberg Institute for School Reform that O-DOE will be positioned to them power, but by building it them- take larger actions and obtain real selves. As educator Jessica reflected: results. While one of their goals is to At the first O-DOE PEP action, continue to expose the lack of democ- it was exciting that their [PEP’s] racy within the current system, there meeting was disrupted. . . . But to has also been talk of attempting to me, it was even more exciting that stop the impending closures of forty- we [parents, teachers, and stu- seven schools. They believe that as dents] had our own. more and more people become aware of the inherent injustice in the system, While some TAs saw this event as the numbers of people willing to step successful through the “demand” up for change will grow. lens of change, such as Samuel in his statement that, “We got under the While the TAs have unity around the Chancellor’s skin,” Jessica saw suc- vision of bringing in more and more cess in the fact that O-DOE convened representative voices to flip the power their own meeting of key stakehold- imbalance of the current system, the ers. She continued: TAs seem to negotiate a tension between two views of change: demand What I have found so inspiring versus creation. This tension is inter- about OWS is that people aren’t nal to the group, as well as internal waiting around for politicians to to each individual, as many of them respond any more. There is so express both views at different times. much work happening focused on building our own power in and Through the lens of demand, the TAs across our own communities to discussed their work in terms of forc- make the world of our imagina- ing change through traditional activist tions a reality. methods such as protests, actions, and marches aimed at forcing the power She envisioned what this creation structure to respond to their de- could look like in education: mands. As Sucre described her vision of change: The PEP decides they want to shut down a school; well, maybe it I feel like when something dras- doesn’t shut down. Maybe it gets tic happens, like a strike, which occupied and re-imagined, and in is what I’m hoping teachers are that space there are dreams about able to do, it will shine light on what a school could be. our problems and it will force the Department of Education and Wall Dreaming about what schools could Street bankers to rethink how we be, such as the occupied one that Jes- are treated and rethink the distri- sica described, exemplifies the types bution of wealth. of commitments that teacher activists make. They envision a more socially Sucre demonstrated the “demand” just world and work toward it by vision of change – that to move to standing up to the oppression block- a system in which parents, teachers, ing it from being reality. Regardless and students gain power, there must of whether they think the road there be protests and actions that force the involves demand, creation, or both, powers-that-be to take action on the teacher activists share a vision of their demands. education in which the key stakehold- ers – parents, students, and teachers At other times, the TAs move more to – work together through democratic the OWS model; that change happens practices to create schools that guide not by demanding that someone give students toward liberation.

44 Annenberg Institute for School Reform PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR THE TEACHER ACTIVIST

Jessica Tang

Jessica Tang is a Boston public school teacher and a founding member of the Teacher Activist Group – Boston (TAG-Boston).

Sometimes we experience in life a strong sense that something is very wrong, but we cannot always clearly articulate what it is or pinpoint what may be causing us to feel this way. Sometimes the feeling is so unrelenting that we begin to ask questions, research and read, and discuss our feelings with our friends, family, and colleagues to seek out answers. This is how I felt as a committed and passionate English language arts and social studies public school teacher about my own profession. This is how I felt about the state of public education when I arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Free Minds, Free People Radical Professional Development session. I knew something was very wrong, and I knew I needed to do something about it, but the answers were only coming in pieces.

Thankfully, the pieces came together for me that weekend in a way that was empowering and transformative. Professor Bree Picower clearly articulated what I had been experiencing but had been unable to fully convey within a greater political and economic framework as she described how the education sector is the last remaining public sector that has not yet been privatized, and how the greatest hurdle to accessing billions in profits from the public education sector are unions. This explains why teachers unions are increasingly becoming scapegoats for education reform, despite the fact that states with unions have higher achievement and those without rank the lowest. This explains the move to expand charter schools, which can be run by private institutions and for- profit companies. This explains why so many more “education nonprofits,” such as Stand for Children, that promote these types of agendas are getting major funding from corporations like Walmart and Bain Capital.

After the session, I finally felt that I had a better grasp of the language and concepts I needed to contextualize my own observations and experiences of my classroom, school, and community. It also became powerfully clear that I was not alone. Participants heard from Tucson teacher Curtis Acosta about the struggles to preserve the successful ethnic studies program in Arizona (see Curtis Acosta and Asiya Mir’s article in this issue of VUE). We heard from teachers about the harmful anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin and the inspirational organizing and uprisings of concerned citizens in response to it. We shared stories about school closings in cities across the nation and about the damaging effects of the corporate reform agenda, backed by well-known philanthropic founda- tions, that pushes for charter school expansions, unreliable new data-based teacher evaluation models, and an increasing emphasis on standardized tests. Perhaps most importantly, we had the opportunity to talk, discuss, and strategize about what to do about it all.

In the winter of 2010, a number of other concerned colleagues and I created a social

45 Annenberg Institute for School Reform justice educator’s group called Teacher Activist Group (TAG)-Boston, inspired by the National Teacher Activist Groups Network. Like many new grassroots organizations, we were struggling to define our own mission and create our own vision. During our time at the FMFP session, we were able to meet with organizers from more well- established teacher activist groups such as the New York Coalition of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and Teachers for Social Justice in San Francisco. We were also able to trouble shoot with organizers from similar grassroots organizations in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Oftentimes budding grassroots organizing groups struggle with sustaining the work due to time constraints (especially for teachers with full-time jobs), or maintaining democratic involvement while being able to make decisions quickly as a group. We had questions about meeting structures, maintaining diversity, and how to keep the mo- mentum of our work going, all while practicing the values we believe in such as equity, anti-oppression, and collaboration. The specific challenges were local, but the themes and struggles were universal, and the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and strategies was invaluable.

One year later, at our TAG-Boston meetings, we still refer to suggestions and ideas we collected from our time in Providence. Our monthly meetings are structured similarly to NYCoRE’s; we strive to maintain a 50 percent female and 50 percent people of color coordinating group; and our organizing work is reflective of the TAG-National education platform. Through e-mails and monthly conference calls, we are able to coordinate our efforts, such as the national “No History Is Illegal” response to the attacks on ethnic studies in Tucson, and also share both our successes and our challenges. The national network of teacher activist groups has been an incredible source of support, strength, and hope. It is our continuing hope that as radical educators, we will continue to create more opportunities to educate ourselves and others about the real needs of our students and our schools in the struggle to create an equitable public education system.

For more information on Boston TAG, see http://tagboston.org.

REFERENCES

Herszenhorn, D. M. 2004. “Bloomberg Wins on School Tests after Firing Foes,” New York Times (March 16).

Picower, B. 2012. Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets. New York: Routledge.

46 Annenberg Institute for School Reform A World Where Youth Hold the Power

Adeola A. Oredola with members of Youth in Action

The space cultivated by the youth leadership devel- community health, entrepreneurial opment organization Youth In Action puts young innovation, and creativity. Since its people, traditionally marginalized by adult decision- inception, youth have played key makers, at the center of change in the community. leadership roles at every level of the organization, making up the majority of YIA’s board of directors and run- am the proud executive director of ning all of our community programs. Youth In Action (YIA), a Provi- Teenagers run our organization and I dence, Rhode Island, organization are part of every decision, from ap- that’s all about young people – their proving our budget to choosing the capacity to lead, their natural ability color of paint on the walls to hosting to innovate, and their desire for posi- the 2011 Free Minds, Free People tive change. YIA was started in 1997 conference this past summer. by teenagers driven to build stronger Supporting young people to be at the communities by engaging their peers in forefront of this work is an honor, and arenas of influence that they are typi- I have to say, youth are consistently cally excluded from, including school better at taking the lead than most reform, politics, media, organizing, adults I know. I deeply believe that

Adeola A. Oredola is executive director of Youth In Action, a youth-led nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island.

47 Annenberg Institute for School Reform young people are every community’s will ultimately give up hope of ever best problem solvers, and we demon- seeing a difference. In so many cities strate that at YIA every day. In fact, I across the country, people are full of believe it’s critical for young people to hopelessness due to overwhelming pov- be at the center of change in every com- erty and struggling schools. The young munity if we’re ever going to see that people best positioned to give their

better world we all know is possible. voice and power to help fix what’s broken in these cities usually move on From the U.S. civil rights movement to “better” places and opportunities to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall as quickly as possible. In the commu-

Street movements, few large-scale nities they leave behind, a small few pushes for social change have been suc- (usually those least impacted by these cessful without youth. They have been problems) make all of the important decisions, and others either follow their “ lead or leave. This is the pattern of a broken city.

To create a new narrative in Provi- dence, many local leaders and activists It’s critical for young people to be at the are publicly challenging perceptions of young people as passive consumers of center of change in every community. their environment and embracing in- novative strategies that support youth as co-constructors and powerful agents “ for change. What’s slowly emerging is a dynamic youth community with knowledge about the systemic challeng- the lifeblood of social change efforts es it faces and the ability to mobilize across this globe, but they have yet to the city to drastically shift power, be acknowledged and valued for the policy, and practice. What would our seats they’ve earned at the table (or for cities look like if we all started to truly their feet in the picket line). Like many see youth as powerful assets instead cities across the country, Providence is of problems? I grew up in Providence a place where young people – particu- around adults who saw my potential larly youth of color in under-resourced to be a strong force in my community communities – are marginalized in and supported me to follow that path. almost every decision-making circle. As an adult, I partner with youth This problem has historical roots in the throughout the city, building their narrow power structures and practices potential to bring about social justice that constitute Providence and is part because I see it as the way for us to of the bigger economic crisis facing the heal our city. In Providence and other city today. small pockets across the country, young people are taking the lead to fix what’s As a young person of color, you can broken – successfully tackling issues in view yourself as powerful or powerless community health, the justice system, within the systems that impact you. A public transportation, and education. young person who is supported to be powerful will fight to have a say when At YIA, the power of youth starts with it comes to their schools or their neigh- our building. In 2001, YIA youth lead- borhoods. A young person who feels ers bought and renovated a four-story powerless will see their environment as building. After raising half a million something that can’t be changed and dollars, working with architects, and

48 Annenberg Institute for School Reform shedding lots of sweat and tears, we A NEW DEFINITION OF YOUTH have a youth center in the heart of NWANDO OFOKANSI • AGE 20 South Providence where YIA’s programs are needed most. When you • YIA CLASS OF 2008 • FORMER walk through the doors at 672 Broad COMMUNITY HEALTH TEAM Street, you immediately feel that the COORDINATOR energy is different from other places YIA is where you realize that youth you’ve been. I believe it has to do with have much more power than we’re giv- a different mindset, learning process, en credit for. That’s the cognizance that power dynamic, and perspective about you have when you come here, because what’s possible that we all share. In your voice really does matter. Outside many ways, we see this building of you’re just a kid, your parents pay the ours as a second home, a studio, and rent, they buy the food, and make the a laboratory where we’re beginning to decisions – so it’s like you’re not even a create the better world we envision. person yet. You’re basically somebody Over the past fourteen years, YIA has else’s person, somebody else’s prop- become a positive, youth-driven force erty. When you come to a place like in our community. We believe the key YIA, that’s when you realize you have elements of what we do – and the prac- a mind of your own and wisdom that tice that’s emerging in small pockets people don’t expect someone your age across the country – can and should be to have. It’s here that you can actually transferred to other spaces. Authentic channel that wisdom into something youth engagement in every classroom, tangible. neighborhood, and policy-making You can clearly see the huge impact circle holds the power to transform we’ve had on the city with the way an entire city. Recently, I sat with a “urban” youth are standing up and group of YIA members to ask what being perceived. Each young person they think are some of the key elements in my community represents some of of our work. In addition to creating the negative and some of the positive a space for youth to thrive and create statistics surrounding our schools and change in our community, they believe neighborhoods. But we don’t need we work hard to promote a new defini- those labels; we need people to really tion of youth; we have the expectation know who we are. At YIA you have that both youth and adults are grow- the opportunity to define yourself, but ing together; we create opportunities that can go against who you’ve been to regularly engage in a practice of told you are. We’re defining ourselves disagreement; and we focus on learning as smart, educated, and powerful. I and speaking truth even when it’s diffi- was so altered, and in a way damaged, cult or uncomfortable. The following is by things I had known from outside a series of YIA moments and reflections – like what I’m not supposed to be to provide some context for how these capable of saying or doing because of elements play out in the world of YIA, my age, or the perceived lack of beauty from the perspectives of the youth and and intelligence among my race. It was adults who bring it to life each day. hard to start with a clean slate and begin to think about myself and my community in a new light. But that’s what needs to happen when you’re trying to set goals for your life and your community that are different from what you see everyday.

49 Annenberg Institute for School Reform YOUTH AND ADULTS ARE and happy that the pluses were great! I GROWING TOGETHER actually had to look away for a second to wipe away a few tears. I also felt ERROLL LOMBA • AGE 37 • YIA grateful for the deltas. They were ac- DIRECTOR OF YOUTH PROGRAMS curate and led to a good conversation. YIA’s community health team was in a We were able to start problem solving place where they needed to look at the right away. roadblocks holding back their work. Engaging in this activity with our They recognized the biggest challenges youth means that I’m just as account- were internal issues like maturity, com- able for what happens on the team munication, and lack of accountability. as they are. My expectation was that A series of hard conversations needed they would evaluate and critique me to take place in order for everyone to honestly and without fear because get back on track. that’s what we welcome young people We decided to use a YIA team tradition to do here. Our belief is that if you can called the “Plus Delta Hot Seat.” It’s push back against adultism and create basically an opportunity for every- a different dynamic here, you can do one to give and receive feedback on that anywhere. Youth have the right to contributions to the team and areas expect this from us. for growth. A piece of newsprint with a person’s name on it is set up with a GIOVANNI LARRACUENTE • AGE 15 column for pluses (strengths and con- • YIA CLASS OF 2013 • MEDIA TEAM tributions to celebrate) and a column for deltas (areas for growth). The per- MEMBER son is asked to leave for a few minutes High school is usually a pivotal time so the team can begin to discuss their where teens are extremely self-con- pluses and deltas. Then they’re invited scious and very careful of what they back to join the discussion. Now I say and do. I was fortunate enough know it sounds brutal here on paper, to find YIA early, so I was a bit more but believe me, the whole process comfortable with myself starting high comes from a place of love and respect. school. My insecurities took a back No one leaves hurt, broken, or under seat to the acceptance and encourage- attack because we’re a family and we ment I became accustomed to with my just don’t do it like that. YIA family. At YIA, it’s actually weird when you don’t voice your opinion. When we talked about doing this, I Schools are missing that interpersonal felt it was important for the adults to aspect of the learning experience. YIA participate, too, and I offered myself as adults are open books, and they don’t the first to be evaluated. Saying it was want to control us. They want to one thing, but when the time came to work with us regardless of or maybe do it I was definitely feeling nervous even because of our age. Teachers and (despite all of the things I said above administrators tend to demand respect about love and respect). I was afraid but feel like treating students with the they would say things like, “Erroll same respect is pointless. It’s hard to smells like onions” or “He’s really bad get to acceptance and encouragement at his job!” But when it was my turn, when respect isn’t even there. I stepped out of the room and allowed the team to begin the process. Once I On a typical day at YIA, learning is was back in the room and the discus- happening everywhere – it’s usually sion about me continued, I looked at in a conversation, a documentary, a what they wrote. I felt both relieved meeting, a song, or a workshop. It’s

50 Annenberg Institute for School Reform in whatever we do, but nobody is or if you talk about politics, want to speaking at you. We don’t sit and listen read a different book, or believe the to lectures or do dittos. We raise the rules adults have set up are a mistake, issues we care about and discuss or de- people usually don’t want to hear bate before, during, and after program about it. You don’t have permission to meetings. We’re learning in the real disagree in other places. Because we do world in a fashion that builds logic and here, we get to a deeper understand- builds all of us up as people. Schools ing of one another, and then suddenly don’t seem to grasp this yet. Teachers a new community program is starting tell you what to think and never actu- or we’re finding better ways to support ally ask what you need or encourage each other. critical thinking. I suggest that school districts look at YIA’s model because our success is not based on a piece of DIANA JACQUES • AGE 17 • YIA paper, but on the decisions students CLASS OF 2013 • COMMUNITY make and the confidence they have HEALTH COORDINATOR moving forward in their lives. That’s I argue with someone at YIA at least the real success. once a week – but in a good way. In the world, there are a lot of controversial

THE PRACTICE OF topics like race, faith, abortion, or gay DISAGREEMENT marriage. YIA is filled with different opinions and beliefs, but the trust we

MARLIE CHATELAIN • AGE 17 • YIA have in each other makes it easier to get CLASS OF 2012 • BOARD CO-CHAIR past the controversy and find solutions. When ideas flow at YIA, relationships form and minds are opened. In fact, regular debates help us build from dis- “ agreement, which is an important part of what we do. I remember one day I like that I’m part of a place where there Izzy, Chris, Olu, and I had a debate about faith. It was pretty emotional – are so many different opinions. The trust, with Izzy who is agnostic, Chris not believing in a higher power, Olu a respect, and openness make us stronger. Muslim, and myself a Christian. Ordi- narily with such different backgrounds, “ it could’ve been an impossible discussion to get through. But this is one of the many conversations I cherish at YIA because it changed me. My core There are a lot of pregnant or parent- values and belief in Christianity are the ing teens in Providence. That’s why same, but I have a different perspective one of the things YIA teens do is teach because now I fully understand all of our peers in the larger community their views too. about comprehensive health education (which unfortunately isn’t happening As a young person, if you raise a in schools). But sometimes a conflict controversial issue you’re usually shut arises for me between the work I do down. I like that I’m part of a place and my own beliefs. Most of us at YIA where there are so many different opin- are children of immigrants, and there ions. The trust, respect, and openness are traditional values that we’re pulled make us stronger. If you disagree with to follow. For example, my family is a teacher, a police officer, or the mayor

51 Annenberg Institute for School Reform from Haiti and is very old-fashioned a short story by Richard Connell. It’s when it comes to relationships. I know a story that contains an overflow of it’s kind of weird for someone my age, male stereotypes – like many of the but I actually agree with many of my books we read in that class. I felt very parent’s values. I plan to get married uncomfortable and decided to voice my before having sex and believe that oth- opinion during our first class discus- ers should wait for marriage, too. We sion, and then again when it seemed have heated debates about this at YIA like my concerns were pushed aside. I and during our community workshops. asked my teacher why we were spend- The reality is that Providence has one ing so much time on a story where the of the highest repeat teen birth rates male ego was so dominant. The teacher in the country. But for many Provi- replied, “Well that’s just a part of the dence youth, even using the word sex story; don’t read too much into it.” at home is forbidden and the belief How could I not do that? in abstinence before marriage is the I decided to start a small group to expectation, no matter what that teen discuss the issue outside of class, which might think or feel. So for me the con- is how we would do it at YIA. As a flict is – how do I help my community young woman of color, I was eager to and still remain true to my own beliefs? start spending some class time read- Through our debates and disagree- ing about and discussing the power ments at YIA, I usually find my answer. and impact of young leaders like me. I learn that it’s not just about me. It’s I found that many of my classmates about the people around me too. I feel felt the same way, but they also felt a responsibility to take the ups and that if they voiced their opinions in downs of my community personally. class it wouldn’t matter. So as a group In the past few years, I have seen too we went to the teacher and made our many freshmen at my school get preg- voices heard. We were against con- nant and then permanently disappear tinuing to discuss stories like this, but from the hallways. I can do something excited about working together to about that. Our community is faced identify new reading material that was with so many issues, and we have to more relevant to our lives. In the end come together (even if it starts with an the teacher agreed that we had con- argument) to create something better. crete concerns, and he decided to move I’ll always be affected by the injustice on to a new story more empowering to of others and will do whatever I can to the students. Through this experience, change a situation that holds us back. I learned that no matter where you are, there is power in numbers when youth use their voices together. LEARNING AND SPEAKING TRUTH MONAY THREATS MCNEIL • AGE 19 • BUKKY OLUGBEMI • AGE 18 • YIA YIA CLASS OF 2010 • FORMER MEDIA CLASS OF 2011 • FORMER YOUTH 4 TEAM COORDINATOR CHANGE ALLIANCE MEMBER At the Free Minds, Free People confer- Understanding my voice helped me ence, I became a teacher of teachers outside of YIA. My public speaking and it was amazing! The workshop skills and confidence grew drastically I presented in was called “Radical from freshman to senior year. I found Professional Development” and cen- myself advocating for my classmates tered on how public education fits (or more. In my English class we were doesn’t fit) the needs of students. I reading “The Most Dangerous Game,” was invited to share my perspective

52 Annenberg Institute for School Reform as a recent graduate of Providence between me and most other young Public Schools. I told everyone in the people in my neighborhood was that a room about my experience as a student few people in my community decided in the system, the ways in which I to help me access my power as a leader. felt unsupported, and how YIA was a I always tell people about the time I major catalyst for my personal growth went to my guidance counselor at my as a teenager. high school and said that I wanted to One of the most important aspects of go to Brown University. He looked learning at YIA for me was the sense of at me with this pained expression on investment in the lessons, in each other, his face and said “students from this and in everyone learning and teach- school don’t get into Brown.” Well, ing at the same time. The cool thing is he was the expert, so I believed him – that a similar dynamic was created in until a few of the community leaders this workshop. As a student in a public in my life at the time set me straight. school, I always felt like I was a box in They encouraged me to ignore the which information was placed, some- counselor’s words and apply. They thing useless and irrelevant. Traditional worked with me every step of the way, education never addressed my needs as and when I got my acceptance letter a person. It can be hard for educators from Brown in the mail, I made sure I to hear that feedback, that truth. But left a copy of it right in the middle of during the workshop, the teachers were that guidance counselor’s desk. actually ready to listen and problem Fast forward to the following fall. I solve with me. From my experience at was finally a college student, the first YIA, I know that’s where the change in my family to make it. I was feeling begins – through listening and being proud and confident walking through heard. It felt good to finally be able to those famous gates onto campus. A few tell someone on the opposite end – the weeks into the semester, those feelings teacher, that is – what it’s like to be a melted away and turned into anger student in a system that doesn’t seem to because I realized I had been severely understand you. I know that students underserved by my education before are best positioned to speak this kind getting to college. It was a difficult year of truth and change our schools. I’m of catching up on the academic skills I grateful to Free Minds, Free People for was never taught. I eventually reached creating an opportunity for me to be out for support after almost failing a the educator and deliver an important few classes. I used every resource on message that I believe every teacher in campus and got used to endless nights urban schools should hear. at the library when most students were already in bed. As a young woman of THAT BETTER WORLD color at a school filled with a predomi- nately privileged, white student body, ADEOLA OREDOLA AGE 31 YIA • • I struggled to define my identity and EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR my place amidst it all. At some point, I My heart lives in this work because realized I was actually used to finding I personally know its impact. I grew solutions in the face of hardship and up in a struggling neighborhood in struggle. In order to get through, I Providence. I went to public schools had to reignite the same resilience and and faced the typical challenges of self-validation that initially moved me less-advantaged young people in urban to apply to an Ivy League school in the communities – not because they are first place – the life skills that my men- any less capable, but simply because tors and family always pushed me to they have less. The biggest difference develop and utilize.

53 Annenberg Institute for School Reform It was a big deal for me to finish at environment where youth and adults Brown because it meant so many can work together toward social amazing things for my family, but I justice and education for liberation. remained bitter about my education For example, educators could begin and knew that students were continu- to create space in their classrooms ing to be underserved in Providence. for students to give honest feedback I also didn’t want people to believe or contribute to the curriculum. that the traditional narrative of “poor Together, parents and children could people can get ahead with a little hard begin to learn about the history of work” was what my journey to get a social movements and build pride college degree was about. What got in the natural skills and power they me through college was my ability to possess themselves in spite of (or in critically reflect on my own life his- many cases because of) the hardship tory, the systems that had shaped me and oppression they may face in their yet often excluded me, and the vision neighborhoods and schools. Com- I had for all the young people behind munity leaders could begin to create me. The fall after I graduated from meaningful opportunities for young college, instead of leaving Providence people to speak for themselves (with like so many others, I decided to stay. support) when it comes to important I joined the local school board to decisions within their organization or advocate for students and took a job the larger community. at YIA to help teenagers fight for a Because of the foundation that’s better city. I chose to stay because I already been laid across the country, felt my community had given me so the possibilities are endless. It’s our much, and whether it was overzeal- responsibility and our right to pave ous or not, I felt both responsible and the way for a better world by un- powerful enough to give it all back. learning what keeps all of us bound, This past summer I saw YIA and relearning the things that liberate all Providence in a new light when we of us, and knowing the difference hosted the 2011 Free Minds, Free between the two. People Conference. Hosting Free Minds, Free People was important because it gave us proof that in small For more information on Youth in pockets across the country people are Action, see www.youthinactionri.org. shifting traditional power dynamics. Adults and youth are partnering in new ways to change their communities. The next step is for all of us to collectively broaden our reach and grab onto that better world we know is possible. Those of us who believe in youth power need to help adults collectively realize that – as history has taught us – we will continue to be stuck without the strength and creativity of young people.

Then we need to invite others to learn about our practice. Every classroom, household, and community organization should know how to create an

54 Annenberg Institute for School Reform THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND QUEER IDENTITY Kathy Vang is a youth member of Southeast Asian Queers United for Empowerment and Leadership, a program of the Providence Youth Student Movement.

Southeast Asian Queers United for Empowerment and Leadership (seaQuel) is an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) program within the organization Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) that helps young people to become more comfortable with their sexuality and gender identity in their community. It is the only program working with queer youth of color in the state of Rhode Island that has a focus on the Southeast Asian community. The queer Southeast Asian (QSEA) experience is a unique one because of our history. Many in the Southeast Asian community came to America as a result of the “Vietnam War,” also known as the “American War.” They came as refugees to escape death and create new lives for themselves. The war devastated the countries in Southeast Asia, and those who escaped to America had to rebuild their lives. Because the older generation lost the country they once knew, many have held tight to their traditions, customs, and values, which has often made it hard for QSEA individuals to come out to their families. Many feel pressure to hide their sexuality, because to be queer can bring shame to the family. There is a sense of indebtedness that the younger generation feels they owe to the older generation for escaping to America to give the younger generation a better life. The language barrier between generations can also make it hard to create dialogue. This makes it tough for the older generation to understand the younger generation and the coming-out process. Within the broader LGBTQ community, QSEA individuals have often felt invisible and marginalized – seaQuel gives them the opportunity to discuss common issues they face as a community before they step out into the larger LGBTQ community. We as youth leaders speak up about issues facing our community and educate others, giving them the courage to speak up. We organize community events addressing issues affecting the QSEA community, such as racism in the LGBTQ community and homophobia in the Southeast Asian community. Along with these events, we are publishing a national report with other QSEA organizations. This report is one of the first to document QSEA individuals’ experiences facing homophobia, coming out, gang violence, family dynamics, racism, and exclusion, as well as many other issues. This report consists of responses analyzed and taken from surveys disseminated across the nation by seaQuel youth and other QSEA organizations. The report will help the older generation and the straight community see what LGBTQ individuals have to go through in their daily lives, as well as reach out to other QSEAs who are dealing with similar issues. Through educating the community on LGBTQ issues, the young generation can create a world where they would want to live. Through engaging the older Southeast Asian generation, young people can educate and create dialogue with them on the topics of sexuality and gender identity and come to a mutual understanding and support for change. Involvement in seaQuel develops young people’s leadership so they are able to create the change they want to see in their community. Our generation is the generation of change, and through our work, we will make a difference for our community. For more information on PrYSM, see www.prysm.us.

55 Annenberg Institute for School Reform NATIONAL STUDENT BILL OF RIGHTS: BUILDING A MOVEMENT THROUGH ASSERTING RIGHTS

Bryant Muldrew and Thomas Nikundiwe

Bryant Muldrew is an educational organizer with the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) and the co-director of Follow Your Dreams, Inc. Thomas Nikundiwe is an Education for Liberation Network advising board member.

The United States has a long history of suppressing people’s rights. It has just as long a history of people asserting, organizing, and formalizing their rights. Whether at the Con- stitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787, or the Free Minds, Free People (FMFP) conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2011, or the thousands of times and places in between, people have demanded protection from tyranny. In 1791, ten amendments to the constitution were ratified, protecting people’s constitutional rights. In the decades and centuries that followed, people’s demands to be counted as full citizens with guaranteed rights resulted in more amendments that redefined who counted as a citizen. But among those initial rights that were asserted and later ex- panded, education was nowhere to be found. To this day, there is no federal protection of education in the United States. Young people across the country are trying to change that and are doing it on their own terms by creating a National Student Bill of Rights.

Connecting the Local to the National

With the support of parents, educators, community organizers, and adult allies, young people have been working in solidarity to draft a National Student Bill of Rights for All Youth that will become a unifying document for youth nationwide and driving force for youth movement building. Taking up the struggle of all the generations before them to be recognized, youth at the 2009 FMFP conference in Houston, Texas, launched a process that would eventually result in a national student bill of rights for all youth. Youth from Oakland, Providence, Baltimore, Chicago, and Salt Lake City pledged to take this idea to their home cities to develop local versions of the National Student Bill of Rights.

Why We Have to Have It

The young people at FMFP in Houston understood that the National Student Bill of Rights is both a significant document that will sit alongside our Declaration of Indepen- dence and Constitution and an organizing tool that will build power for young people. The federal protection of education is important and necessary, but not any more important than the organizing work that it will take to make the collective demand for it to exist. In devising rights like: “students and youth shall have the right to safe and secure public school facilities of equal quality regardless of wealth, poverty, or place of residence” and “students and youth shall have the right to study curriculum that acknowledges and affirms the ongoing struggle of oppressed peoples for equality and justice and that addresses the real, material, and cultural needs of their communities,”

56 Annenberg Institute for School Reform young people are demanding a full education as they define it. As it stands now, the national conversation about education is happening largely without those the conversation impacts most: students. Students are obligated to participate in the system, yet have no control over their education. The National Student Bill of Rights is working to change the conversation by inserting the idea and language of student rights into the conversation and as a result building a national network of students, parents, educators, and communities all invested in genuine educational transformation.

Where It’s Headed

Currently, youth in the South and on the East and West coasts are at work on the current draft of the National Student Bill of Rights. Students, organizations, teachers, schools, organizers, and coalitions are working to get the draft considered at the National Democratic Convention in September; collecting testimonies; creating curricula; devising street theater; refining language in the draft; presenting at conferences, in classrooms, and workshops; and tweeting, following, and liking National Student Bill of Rights updates using social media. It is in the work of creating a demand for a National Student Bill of Rights that the power to enact a National Student Bill of Rights resides. In building this power, youth are starting to identify that they do have educational rights and that they will assert these rights regardless of the passage of any legislation. Through their assertion for the right to a high-quality education, including those things that impact their ability to be and learn in school, young people are building a national movement.

For more information on the National Student Bill of Rights, see www.facebook.com/ groups/96854348156.

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58 Annenberg Institute for School Reform